
MIOHAKL MOIS'AHAN 



BENIGNA VENA: 

ESSAYS, LITERARY AND PERSONAL 



By MICHAEL MONAHAN 



THE ALBAN PUBLISHING COMPANY 

NEW YORK 

1904 






T^E LIBRARY OF: 
CONGtRESS, 

OwF Copy Rf.obivto 

FEi:, !5 1905 

CLASS >/ TOffli W< 
COPY d . 



Copyright, 1904, by Michael Monahan. 
Published December, 1904. 






Of this edition 500 copies were printed and the 
type di^buted. 



34' 



This is No. 



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Al J^ide^ el ingeni 
^eni^na Vena e^st. 

—Horace. Lib. 11-18. 



TO MY FRIEND 

THOMAS FRANCIS GRADY 

OF NEW YORK. 

My dear Senator: 

Though the literary Patron be no longer held in honor nor the 
Dedication in fashion, you will I know permit me to write your name 
on this page, in token of the great debt of kindness you have laid upon me. 

We have had some good hours together, in the genial commerce 
of books — (shall we not have many more such ?) — and with a sympathy 
now become very rare in the world, backed by a pra<ftical generosity 
that, dropping myself, recalls the Heroic Age of Letters — you have helped 
a poor dreamer to realize his dream. 

Can he do less than to inscribe your honored name here in the fore- 
front of his pages, with the hope, however vain, that for your sake, at 
least, his Book may long defeat the rasure of time ? 

I am, my dear Senator, 

Your mo£t sincere and obedient 

MICHAEL MONAHAN. 

Somerville, N. J., November 21, 1904. 



The Contents. 



PAGE 

A Ballade of Futility 11 

Heinrich Heine 13 

Dr.*Maginn and Father Prout 51 

Guy de Maupassant 87 

A Lost Poet 95 

To the Shade of Lamb 101 

Captain Gostigan 106 

A Ghristmas Sermon 112 

The Endless War 116 

Glaude Tillier 123 

Henriette Renan 131 

Byron 143 

The Nemesis of Garlyle 153 

At Poe's Cottage 161 

Literary Folk 167 

Dickens : A Reverie 175 



BENIGNA VENA. 



'Bailade of Ftitilitjr. 



(In Lieu of 'Preface to thU ^ooK.) 

ALACK for the fate that comes to all 

Brain- wearied wights of the scribbling trade! 
Sib are they to Oblivion's pall, 

A circle in water, dust and shade. 
Was it for this such stress they made 

To scale the slippery peaks of fame, 
Only to see their visions fade — 

Back to the night from whence they came? 

Dear God ! the struggle through barren years, 

The hope deferred and the waiting long. 
And for a guerdon of all their tears, 

A briefer date than an idle song. 
For not to these do the heights belong, 

Where the throned bards made glad acclaim, 
But Charon's curse and his bitter thong — 

Back to the night from whence they came. 

For this they bartered their earthly peace, 

And let the sweetness of life go by ; 
Nor recked while they saw the moons decrease. 

And the tides of being run scant and dry : — 
Yea, even when Death himself drew nigh, 

Him would they welcome, nor harshly blame. 
Seeing the Portal of Victory — 

Back to the night from whence they came ! 
11 



Tell me, ye dupes of an empty dream, 

Is life no more than a pedant's hour, 
To spoil of paper a hasty ream, 

Then quick to bed with the earth-worm dour? 
Eheu ! mislikes me your sermon sour. 

With its bellman's ending, aye the same : 
Fain would I take at least a flower 

Back to the night from whence I came. 

Poor fools, that stew in your own vain sweat, 

Nor ever cease to swither and swink. 
Pray, what is the recompense you'll get, 

When your red blood turns to water and ink? 
A bit of immortal fame, you think — 

Aere perennius — that's the game? 
But lo ! you're snuffed out quick as a wink — 

Back to the night from whence you came. 

L^ENVOI. 

Prince, be you wise in your golden prime : 
Live you and love while the pulses flame. 

Till careless you pass — sans prose, sans rhyme — 
Back to the night from whence you came. 




13 



> 
Heinrich Heine, 



•^^'^ 



■^ -^' ..-■'^■^^. -li" 



A Fantasy. 




ADAME, if you ask me who is my favorite 
Poet, I who can deny you nothing, must 
answer truly, he is none of my own race. 
Rare are the singers of Erin, Madame, 
and their Castalia is a fountain of tears: whoso 
drinks of its sweet sorrow shall never be happy 
again. Like the fated one who has heard the Ban- 
shee's wail, that soul shall in the midst of joy feel 
the near presence of calamity, a boding at the heart 
which nothing can silence. This precious blue 
flower of sorrow is proper to the poets of my beloved 
Erin. It would not flourish under less tender and 
humid skies, for it is born of the rainbow of her 
smiles and tears. 

But, Madame, I have from my youth read a mort 
o' poetry, and have even written a little myself — in- 
different bad, I may admit without a qualm, since 
the sin was committed long ago and you were the 
dear occasion of iti Alas ! perhaps it had been bet- 
ter for my peace of mind had I followed the counsel 
of my old priestly instructors, "to avoid all oc- 
casions of sin." 

You know, Madame, that the making of poetry is 
no longer in fashion, for many reasons, but chiefly 

13 



because the present age is too banal to inspire or re- 
ceive it. Meantime we have to deal with prose, or 
verse that is jejune and vain. Have we not good 
reason to love our sainted Heinrich, whose prose is 
better than most English poetry? In truth, if we 
had not a line of his verse, his prose, brilliant, 
various, alive with rare imagery, sparkling with the 
treasures of the richest fancy ever given to poet, — 
would serve to crown him with bays unfading. 
True, as he himself said of tJie gentle Autommarchi, 
it is a stiletto rather than a style : but what a relief 
after the divine heaviness of Goethe! He struck 
fiercely, did our Heinrich, though often he wounded 
his own breast; and how deep was his gift of tears! 
What he said of another is truer still of himself: 
"He was the petted darling of the pale Goddess of 
Tragedy. Once in a fit of wild tenderness she 
kissed him as though she would draw his whole 
heart through his lips with one long, passionate 
kiss. The heart began to bleed, and suddenly 
understood all the sorrows of this world, and was 
filled with infinite sympathy." 

•I* "fr "t" 4: 

To know our Heine, Madame, is to renew one's 
faith in the old Greek mythology — sl system in 
which the aristocracy of mind is finely manifest — 
and to worship Nature as she was worshipped in the 
antique world. Nay, this modern Heinrich Heine 
was but an avatar of the old Hermes — ^you see, 
Madame, the initial letter is the same and yet the 
discovery is original with me ! Heine himself took 

14 



little care to cloak his divine origin. Life and 
light and love, while they were granted to him, these 
were the elements of his religion. Early and late 
he paid his vows to Venus. His voice was a pro- 
test harking back to old Olympus against the new 
Religion of Pain. Much pain he came to suffer 
himself, perhaps through the malice of the later 
Dispensation ; but he died as he had lived, a son of 
the gods. Surely the immortal mind was never 
stronger in him than when from his "mattress 
grave" where he lay half blind and paralyzed, his 
unconquered spirit sent forth this message, match- 
less in its pathos and irony : 

"What avails it me that enthusiastic youths and 
maidens crown my marble bust with laurel, when 
the withered hands of an aged nurse are pressing 
a poultice of Spanish flies behind my ears? What 
avails it me that all the roses of Shiraz glow and 
waft incense for me? Alas ! Shiraz is two thous- 
and miles from the Rue de I'Atosterdam where in 
the wearisome loneliness of my sick room I get no 
scent, except it be, perhaps, the perfume of warmed 
towels. Alas! God's satire weighs heavy on me. 
The great Author of the Universe, the Aristophanes 
of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating with crush- 
ing force to me the little, earthly German Aristo- 
phanes, how my wittiest sarcasms were only piti- 
ful attempts at jesting in comparison with his, and 
how miserably I am beneath him in humor, in colos- 
sal mockery!" 



15 



It is strange, Madame, how godly men pointed the 
finger of condemnation at the stricken Poet, putting 
the Christian anathema upon him. Our poor 
Hermes was having his Passion and the sight of his 
agonies filled the pietists with rapture. In mediae- 
val times, still regretted in some centres of Chris- 
tian instruction as the true ages of faith, there 
was a sort of zealots called flagellants, who used 
to run madly over Europe, beating themselves — and 
murdering the Jews. How little essential change 
has taken place in the religious spirit ! Now Heine 
hated this spirit with a hatred bequeathed to him 
by generations of his hunted and suffering race, 
that is to say, like a Jew ; and he also hated it like 
the true Hellene he was: so it took what revenge 
it could upon him. The little German princelings 
who put up conductors on their funny little courts 
and castles to dodge the lightnings of his wit, also 
furnished some diversion in kind. For this man 
had written — 

"The people have time enough, they are immortal : 

Kings only are mortal." 
"The human spirit has its rights and will not be 

rocked to sleep by the lullaby of church bells." 
"Men will no longer be put off with promissory 
notes upon Heaven." 

4. 4. 4^ 4. 

Madame, when I think of my favorite Poet, whom 
I so love, though of an alien race, there comes to me 
a vision which I must put into rude and graceless 
words — ah, how unworthy of him who has painted 

16 



it for all time with the iris-hued pencil of fancy ! I 
seem to stand on the banks of the blue Bhine, look- 
ing over a fair prospect of vine-covered champaign ; 
quaint villages shining in the cheerful sun, alternat- 
ing with the umbrage of forest ; now and again the 
river flashing its silver upon the sight; — and still 
farther beyond, a smiling expanse of flower-decked 
meadow and plain. But in all that beauteous pic- 
ture my fancy seeks a little garden, tangled and 
overgrown with grasses and wild flowers, where the 
gardener's care has not been felt for many a day. 
There, in its most neglected and obscure corner, 
when the moon is risen, I see the cold pure gleam of 
marble; a broken statue of the antique Venus, 
fallen from its pedestal and lying half buried under 
leaves and vines. And see, while I wait, there 
comes with fearful, faltering step a boy whose pale 
young face is fixed with the resolve of a strange 
passion. Ah me! what ghostly tryst is this? Cast- 
ing a swift glance around, he flings himself upon his 
knees beside the fallen Queen of Love and kisses 
the silent marble lips, murmuring broken words 
which are not for me to hear. Eising, the solemn 
stars look upon a face transfigured by destiny and 
the sacrament of the Ideal. 
A nightingale sings. 

4? 4? •!• 4* 

Now I see a youth leaving the gates of an ancient 
city. With knapsack on shoulder he trudges away 
joyously, as one to whom life opens its fairest prom- 
ise. It is the boy of the deserted garden, but older 
grown, and with a light in his eyes that owes noth- 

17 



ing to the flight of years. Gaily he begins his jour- 
ney, Nature bidding him on with her eternal smile 
that only the young understand. Oh, never has she 
companioned a more memorable pilgrim ! But soft ! 
the poet's heart within him speaks : "It is the first of 
May, and spring is pouring a foam of white blos- 
soms like a sea of life over the earth. Green, the 
color of hope, is everywhere around me. Every- 
where flowers are blooming like beautiful miracles, 
and my heart will bloom again also. This heart 
is likewise a flower of strange and wondrous sort. 
It is no modest violet, no smiling rose, no pure 
lily which a maiden may cherish in her white 
bosom; which withers today and blooms again to- 
morrow. No, this heart rather resembles that 
strange heavy flower from the woods of Brazil 
which, according to the legend, blooms but once in 
a century. . . . No, Agnes, this flower blooms not 
often, nor without effort, but now it moves, and 
swells, and bursts in my bosom. . . . My love has 
burst its bud and shoots upward in eternal dithy- 
rambs of poesy and joy !" 

4;. 4. 4. 4^ 

After an interval I see the wayfarer again, paus- 
ing at a stately old house in Hamburg, where kind 
welcome is given him; kindest greeting of all by a 
fair young girl whose dove-like eyes, mirroring a 
truthful soul, rest upon him with a certain pity. 
Ah, how he trembles at her most careless touch, how 
his glance follows her every motion, and when she 
is passive, rivets itself upon her like a devotee be- 
fore a shrine! 

18 



They are in a deep garden, these two, where the 
scent of flowers is heavy on the air. It is a sweet 
hour, breathing yet the full fragrance of a perfect 
day. But the moon mounting up sends a long 
arrow of light across the shimmering foliage, touch- 
ing the girl's pale cheek with the pure glory of 
marble. The youth has taken her hands while she 
turns away her head, as if loath to hear his impas- 
sioned speech. These words at length float to me 
on the garden scents, bringing death in life and an 
immortal despair to one that hears — "I love, I love 
thee. Cousin Amelie. And what sayest thou to 
me?" 

"Alas, Cousin, it must not be!" 

A nightingale sings. 

•i* -l? •J' 4' 

The years take wing with the swiftness of a 
dream, and now I stand in a great hall filled with 
the trophies of art gathered from all ages and 
climes to make the priceless spoil of an imperial 
city. Everywhere the divinity of marble, pulseless 
and serene, while beyond these sacred walls the din 
of vulgar life rises impertinent. And lo ! there in 
sovereign state upon a lofty pedestal I see the an- 
tique Venus of the neglected garden by the Rhine, 
where the boy kept his tryst with the Ideal. The 
divinities make no sign, but well I know her for the 
same that in old time with many a witching guise 
succored her mortal son Aeneas. 

Quid natum totiens, crudeUs tu quoque, 
Falsis ludis imaginibtisf 

19 



Her beauteous arms are gone, that erst encircled 
gods and godlike men, yet as the past was hers, the 
future shall be also. Time has wrought her this 
maim, jealous of her superior sway, and she has 
suffered other wrongs : yet is she still divinely con- 
tent, though her temples have long been dust and 
Paphos with all its rosy rites is become a name. 
For her rule endureth ever in the hearts of men. 

And if you ask a proof, see now that haggard, 
broken man who drags himself wearily to the feet of 
the immortal Goddess. It is he, the youth of long 
ago, who kissed her marble lips and gave his soul 
unto her keeping. Alas ! how cruelly have the years 
dealt with him : yet he looks up to her with a rap- 
ture of unchanged worship and love. O miracle of 
faith, in which the finite rises to the infinite, the 
mortal blends with the immortal ! — see how she re- 
turns his gaze with a fulness of divine compassion, 
as if to say : 

"Thou seest I have no arms and may not help 
thee!" 

Then instantly methought the walls and statues 
vanished, leaving these two alone in the garden 
where I first saw them. . . . 

And a nightingale sang! 



,wr 



20 



The Toer^ Life. 



Heinrich Heine was born December 12, 1799, in 
the city of Dusseldorf on the Rhine. For a long 
time the accepted date of his birth was January 1, 
1800, and the poet refused to correct the error, say- 
ing he was unquestionably one of the first men of the 
Nineteenth century. Also let it be set down here, 
he was born a Jew — a statement which would have 
sounded worse then than it does now, though in 
this culminating Christian age there is still room 
for improvement. But let us give thanks — all of 
us, Jews and Gentiles — we have come a long way ! 

Heine imbibed in his cradle and during his early 
years a full share of the Juden-Schmerz, the great 
sorrow of Israel. One of his biographers describes 
him as "in soul an early Hebrew, in spirit an an- 
cient Greek, in mind a republican of the Nineteenth 
century." There is an apostasy to be charged to 
him — of which we shall speak later on — and it must 
be admitted that, Jew himself, he did not spare his 
own race the scorpion sting of his sarcasm. But 
a Jew he was in his better moods, in his seasons of 
calm and power ; and a Jew he remained to the last. 
It is good to recall here his noble confession : "The 
writer of these lines may be proud that his ances- 
tors came of the noble House of Israel, that he is a 
descendant of the martyrs who gave a God and a 
moral code to the world, and who have fought and 
suffered on every battlefield of thought." 

Heine's childish years and boyhood were as happy 
as those of a poet should be. Of this enchanted pe- 
riod he has left us a characteristic and delightful 

31 



record. Indeed, he has told the story so well that 
no one may presume to tell it after him without bor- 
rowing the poet's own words. For the old German 
Fatherland, however its political systems might 
provoke his scathing irony, for his native city of 
Dusseldorf, he kept during his long exile in after 
years, the tenderest affection. His mind was at 
home on the Seine; his heart on the Khine. There, 
as he wittily said, were seven towns to dispute the 
honor of being his birthplace, — Schilda, Krahwin- 
kel, Polkwitz, Bockum, Dulken, Gottingen and 
Schoppenstedt. There his poet soul first awoke to 
life and love and beauty. There he lisped that mus- 
ical German speech which his genius was to fuse 
into lyric forms that will keep his memory alive in 
German hearts so long as the Ehine shall run its 
course toward the sea. 

Heine's father, Samson Heine, was an amiable, 
handsome man, and the poet always preserved a lov- 
ing recollection of him ; but, like most great men, he 
was his mother's son. What lover of the poet needs 
to be told much of the "old woman who lives by the 
Dammthor"* ; or of the mutual love extending over 
so many years, unchilled, unchanged ; or of the ten- 
der deception which the stricken poet practised 
from his mattress-grave, keeping her in ignorance 
of his awful fate? To me it is the finest chapter in 
Heine's life, the one to which we turn for rest when 
wearied with his constant feuds, brilliantly as he 
fought them. 

Heine's mother had been a Miss Betty Von Geld- 
ern. She might have made a better marriage in a 



*One of the gates of Hamburg-. 

22 



worldly way, but it would hardly have resulted in 
so good a poet. She deserved w ell of her gifted son 
and he of her. She brought him into the world ; he 
immortalized her. Mother Heine lived a hundred 
years before the New Woman, and yet she made few 
mistakes. One of these was, however, rather seri- 
ous — that Heinrich could, would or should be any- 
thing save a poet. Having been well educated her- 
self — she read Latin, I fear, better than the New 
Woman — Mother Heine followed with eager inter- 
est the growth of her son's mind. "She played the 
chief part in my development," he tells us; "she 
made the programme of all my studies, and, even 
before my birth, began her plans for my education." 
There were other children to divide her care, but 
her darling was the eldest born, the glory of whose 
genius she lived to see, and whom at last she fol- 
lowed to the grave. 

Literature, regarded as a profession, was held 
in small favor by the Heine family, and especially 
by Uncle Salomon Heine, the great banker of Ham- 
burg, of whom we hear so much in the life-story 
of the poet. Uncle Salomon indeed — although he 
helped Heinrich from time to time and never wholly 
abandoned him, except in making his will — 
esteemed the first lyrist of Germany as little better 
than the fool of the family. There was another 
uncle on the mother's side, Simon Von Geldern, who 
seems to have had a literary turn, and who gave the 
young poet much secret encouragement. Having 
little money to back his opinions. Uncle Simon was 
distinctly inferior as a moral force to Uncle Salo- 



mon; and, therefore, he, for the most part, kept 
his heretical views to himself. But the Muse of 
Literary History has done tardy justice to the poor 
relation, and Uncle Simon Von Geldern will always 
have his place in the chronicle. 

However, I am inclined to think more kindly of 
Salomon Heine than are some of the poet's biog- 
raphers. It is scarcely a just cause of reproach that 
Uncle Salomon, the Jew prince of Hamburg (as he 
was called), should have rated commercial values 
so high and literary values so low. He had known 
the Ghetto, with its privations, its galling humili- 
ations, its bitter sense of inferiority. Rising at 
length, by his own exertions, to opulence, it was 
hardly to be expected that he should view with 
tolerance the adoption of so unlucrative a pursuit 
as poetry by a member of his family. Yet, as I have 
said, though he looked askance at his scribbling, 
ne'er-do-well nephew, he never absolutely gave him 
the cold shoulder. The provocation was often 
strong enough, I promise you. Once Heinrich went 
over to London on a sight-seeing tour, Uncle Salo- 
mon furnishing the needful. Besides an allowance 
for traveling expenses, Uncle Salomon entrusted 
the poet with a draft for £400, which Heinrich was 
on no account to cash, but merely to preserve and, 
if need were, exhibit, as establishing the credit of 
the family. Heinrich never could be got to look at 
money in that way. His rule through life was to 
spend his money and every other good thing as soon 
as he came into possession of it — often, indeed, by 
anticipation ; so you may be sure it didn't take him 

S4 



long to realize on the valuable bit of paper. Uncle 
Salomon was furious, and I fancy many a Christian 
uncle would not have spared his wrath in a like 
extremity. To his angry and just reproaches the 
"fool of the family" coolly answered: "My dear 
uncle, did you really expect to have to pay nothing 
for the honor of bearing my name?" 



•i* rl? iji* "l^ 



Heine very early felt the French influence which 
became so controlling an element in his political 
philosophy and which gave so decided a bent to his 
literary genius. History put on her seven-league 
boots while little Heinrich played by the Dussel, 
or in the green alleys of the Schlossgarten. Just a 
month before the poet was born, in the memorable 
year 1799, his great hero. Napoleon, had achieved 
his famous coup d'etat of the 18th Brumaire. The 
Revolution knelt before its master, and then history- 
making proceeded in earnest. In 1806 — Heinrich 
is now seven years old and the First Consul is 
Emperor— Duke William took leave of the Duchy 
of Berg and the dashing Joachim Murat entered as 
Regent. The Rhine Confederation had been formed 
and the German States beaten one after another. 
Indeed, so many great events were happening at 
this time — History paying off her arrears — ^that a 
clear head has much ado to follow them in their 
right order and relation. Happily that is not our 
present business. Amid all this marching and 
counter-marching, allons-mg and alliancing, bay- 
oneting and bulleting, partitioning and protocoliz- 

25 



ing, little Heinrich played with his mates in the 
quaint streets of Dusseldorf, or at home tumbled 
over his toy castles as merrily as the French armies 
busy at the same work in kind. 

But one never-to-be-forgotten day the statue of 
the Elector Jan Wilhelm was missed from the town 
square, and the French troops marched in, the 
"drum-major throwing his gold-knobbed baton as 
high as the first story," while the drunken cripple, 
Gumpertz, rolled in the gutter, singing : 

Ca ira! Ca ira! 

A wonderful day that was to the little boy, his 
eager heart aflame with the new marvel of all this 
fanfare and soldiering. And wonderful days were 
to come, listening to Monsieur LeGrand, the French 
tambour, — "so long billeted upon us, who looked 
like a very devil and yet was such an angelic char- 
acter and such an incomparable drummer!" We 
all know how he taught the young Heinrich with 
his rat-a-tat-tat some lessons of modern history in 
which he, the brave LeGrand, had borne a part ; and 
we have been glad to learn in our turn. Nay, we 
may yet hearken with pleasure to the recitals of 
Monsieur LeGrand. 

"I saw the march across the Simplon, the Emper- 
or in front, with the brave Grenadiers climbing up 
behind, while the startled eagles screamed and the 
glaciers thundered in the distance; I saw the Em- 
peror clasping the standard on the bridge of Lodi ; 
I saw the Emperor in his gray cloak at Marengo ; I 
saw the Emperor on horseback at the battle of the 

26 



Pyramids^ — nothing but smoke and Mamelukes; I 
saw the Emperor at Austerlitz — twing! how the 
bullets whizzed over the smooth ice I I saw, I heard 
the battle of Jena — dum, dum, dum — I saw, I heard 
the battles of Eylau, Wagram — no, I could hardly 
stand it. Monsieur LeGrand drummed till my own 
ear-drum was nearly cracked." 

But a more wonderful day was yet to come, for 
History was all the time getting on in her seven- 
league boots. Every day, nay, every hour, the 
French were upsetting boundaries and generally 
making havoc with the established order. As in the 
fairy tale, the Giant — that is, the people — had 
awakened from his enchanted sleep, and the whole 
world was magically in motion. Murat, the bold 
Joachim, exchanged his spurs for the crown of 
Naples. This was in 1808. King Joachim there- 
upon ceded the Duchy of Berg to his lord and mas- 
ter, Napoleon, who transferred it to his brother, 
Louis, King of Holland. The pendulum was swing- 
ing back and the reign of liberty and equality was 
producing royalties with a vengeance. But some 
good came out of all this, and especially to the long 
persecuted Jews. ( We are not to forget that Heine 
was himself a Jew). In 1812 the Code Napoleon 
was extended to the German provinces under the 
French influence. The mists of the Middle Ages 
took flight. The Ghettos gave up their ghost. 

It was in the palace gardens of Dusseldorf that 
young Heinrich saw the Emperor for the first time, 
the only sovereign to whom his republican con- 

27 



science ever yielded loyalty. Years afterward he 
painted the scene with the strong hues of his genius, 
so that we may see it through the hoy's eager eyes : 

"But what were my feelings when I saw him at 
last with my own eyes — O beatific vision — himself, 
the Emperor! 

"It was in the all6e of the palace gardens at Dus- 
seldorf. 

"As I shouldered my way through the gaping 
crowd, I thought of the deeds and battles which 
Monsieur LeGrand had portrayed for me with his 
drum; my heart beat the grand march — and yet I 
thought at the same time of the police regulations 
which ordered that no one should ride through the 
allee, under a penalty of five thalers. And the Em- 
peror with his retinue rode right through the allee. 
The shuddering trees bowed down to him as he pass- 
ed; the sunbeams peeped timidly through the green 
foliage, and in the blue heaven above there sailed 
into sight a golden star. He wore his plain green 
uniform and his small, world-famous cap. He rode 
a white palfrey which stepped with such calm pride, 
with such assurance and dignity — had I been the 
Grown Prince of Prussia I should still have envied 
that pony ! Carelessly, with a loose seat, the Em- 
peror held up the reins in one hand, and with the 
other patted good-naturedly his horse's neck. It 
was a sunlit, marble hand, a mighty hand, one of 
those two hands that had tamed the hydra of anar- 
chy and quelled the feud of nations. His face was 
of the same hue we see in the marble busts of Greeks 
and Eomans ; the features wore the same expression 

-38 



of calm dignity that the ancients have, and on them 
was written, ^Thou shalt have none other gods than 
me!' 

"The Emperor rode calmly down the all^e. Be^ 
hind him, on snorting chargers, bedizened with gold 
and jewels, rode his retinue. The drums beat, the 
trumpets blared. At my side mad Aloysius spun 
round and round, and clattered out the names of his 
generals ; close by drunken Gumpertz bellowed, and 
the people shouted witli a thousand voices, 'Long 
live the Emperor !' " 

4? •!• "i" 4? 

When Heine was sixteen his family thought to 
decide his vocation for him, and so he was sent to 
Frankfort-on-Main, where there was a ghetto, the 
sweet relish of which the poet never forgot. 

He stayed there only a few weeks, and then Uncle 
Salomon, at Hamburg, tried his hand at making 
something other than a poet out of his nephew. 
Had Uncle Salomon possessed a little more imagi- 
nation, he might have spared himself a, humiliating 
failure. It was impossible to drum the commercial 
ABC into Heinrich's wayward head. Even his 
watch, as he tells us, had a habit of going wrong and 
getting into the hands of the Jews. To make mat- 
ters worse, the graceless youth, for whose future 
Uncle Salomon would not have given a sixpence, 
committed the folly of falling in love with Uncle 
Salomon's beautiful daughter, Amelie. If Heine's 
cousin had been a less prudent and sensible girl, we 
should probably have lost a deal of fine poetry, for, 
of course, they would have got married somehow, 

29 



and Uncle Salomon would have paid the bills until 
the end of the chapter. But Amelie was much of 
her father's mind. She gave her cousin small en- 
couragement and — a more cruel thing — even told 
him she did not like his poetry. In the end, and 
that was very soon, she married a young man of ap- 
proved Hebrew descent and strictly commercial as 
pirations, whose name I haven't taken the trouble 
to remember. 

The critics and biographers have generally de- 
duced from this little passage in Heine's life that he 
carried through all the remaining years an incur- 
able wound of the heart. It is vastly unpopular to 
doubt this, and ungallant in the bargain; but, 
though Heine suffered acutely from the disappoint- 
ment of his first pure love, I am afraid it argues a 
misreading of the facts to impute to him a lifelong 
Wertherian anguish. 

Leaving Hamburg with this bitter-sweet memory 
and finding in his sense of pain and loss, food for the 
lyrical impulse now maturing with his powers, 
Heine returned home to prepare himself for a pro- 
fession. He entered the University of Bonn in 
1819. 

Napoleon being now at St. Helena, the hand was 
set back on the clock. So far as lay in its power, 
the Holy Alliance had undone the work of the Kevo- 
lution. A Jew might not practise the profession of 
law — no profession, indeed, save medicine — in the 
Kingdom of Prussia; so nothing was left for Heine 
but to apostatize or lay aside his ambition — which 
indeed was rather that of his family — to become 

30 



doctor juris. Urged by his relatives and friends 
(who saw no harm in thus evading a barbarous pre- 
scription) he chose the former alternative. For this 
he has been unsparingly, though it seems to me un- 
justly, condemned by the rigor ists of his own race. 
Heine himself affected to regard lightly the circum- 
stance of his quasi-conversion to Lutheranism. 
With incomparable irony he tells us: "That I be- 
came a Christian is the fault of those Saxons who 
changed sides so suddenly at Leipzig ; or else of Na- 
poleon who need never have gone to Russia; or of 
the schoolmaster who taught him geography at 
Brienne and neglected to tell him that it was cold in 
Moscow in winter. If Montalembert became min- 
ister and could drive me away from Paris, I would 
turn Catholic. Paris is well worth one mass !" 

Within a very few years the enlightened govern- 
ment of Prussia paid this notable convert to the 
state religion the handsome compliment of inter- 
dicting his books. It is certain that Heine always 
bitterly regretted the concession he had made to a 
mediaeval prejudice. However lightly one may 
hold a traditional faith, one may choose an easier 
method of parting with it than by an act of formal 
and public apostasy. No man cared less than Heine 
for the anathemas of other men, yet he remained 
keenly sensitive to reproaches on this score. The 
degree of doctor juris which cost his so dear 
brought him nothing. It was from Gottingen, by 
the way, he received this learned distinction — Got- 
tingen, which he has visited with some of the hap- 
piest strokes of his satirical genius. 

31 



Heine was a brilliant but irregular student. He 
was reading and rhyming poetry when he ought 
to have been busy with the pandects. 

So acute and native is the quality of his wit that 
the chronicle of his student days may be read to- 
day with interest as fresh as when it was first 
given to the world. Horace's qualis ah incepto is 
eminently true of Heine — he seems to have begun at 
once with an assured and individual style. 

Prosing with professors over the Justinian Code 
came to an end at last. In his doctoral thesis Heine 
made a slip on the noun caput — the thesis was, of 
course, in Latin — and always remembered it with 
a twinge — which shows he was not entirely devoid 
of the pedantry of the place that he has so amusing- 
ly satirized. He had been previously rusticated 
from the University on account of a duel — his per- 
sonal courage was then and ever after undoubted — 
and the pundits of the institution looked with small 
favor on the poetizing young Jew. Yet in the 
realm of letters, Gottingen is, and ever will be, 
better known from the residence of Heine than from 
any other circumstance in its venerable history, 
Hegel owes to Heine the sole humorous association 
with his name. To the readers of the Harzreise I 
need not recall the famous description of the town 
of Gottingen, ''celebrated for its sausages and Uni- 
versity ;" or the happy application of the term Phil- 
istine, which has passed into universal currency. 

It was in 1824 that Heine shook the dust of Got- 
tingen from his feet and carried away much of its 
learned dust in his brain. Three years earlier his 

32 



great idol Napoleon had died at St. Helena — "the 
saviour of the world" (was Heine's characteristic 
comment) "who suffered under Hudson Lowe, as it 
is written in the gospels of Las Casas, of O'Meara 
and of Autommarchi." And with what is perhaps 
the bitterest stroke of his unequaled irony, he 
added: "Strange, the greatest adversaries of the 
Emperor have already found an awful fate.* Lon- 
donderry cut his throat; Louis 18th rotted on his 
throne, and Prof. Saalfeld is still professor at Got- 
tingen !" 

*3^ Ti? TlT Ti? 

Seven years, rich with the outpouring of his 
genius, followed from the day Heine left the classic 
precincts of Gottingen until he turned his face 
toward France and Paris. In the interval he had, 
in spite of the reigning sovereignty of the great 
Goethe, established his title as the first lyric poet 
of Germany. 

Heine was proud to call himself a son of the 
Revolution, and such he was, in poetic as well as 
political impulse. But he was also a son of the free 
Rhine and would make good his claim to the title. 
No man more fully appreciated the sacrifices made 
by the French people in the cause of human liberty. 
As a Jew, the descendant of a hated and persecuted 
race, he felt a special obligation of gratitude. 

Criticism can take no account of the blemishes 
in Heine's character as a German or as a Jew. The 
measure of his literary accomplishment raises him 



* Byron's "Carotid-artery-cutting Castlereagh." 

33 



above these things. This is the more just since 
Heine as a poet is eminently cosmopolitan. The 
note of provinciality is not in him. And this dis- 
tinction belongs only to poets of the first class. 

Notwithstanding, it is of great interest to study 
Heine in his relation of sympathy, his spiritual or 
racial touch with his own people. I have said that 
he shared deeply in the Juden-Schmerz, the great 
sorrow of Israel. "The history of the Jews," he 
tells us, "is tragical, and yet if one were to write 
about this tragedy, he would be laughed at. This 
is the most tragic of all." 

Heine wrote much and variously on this subject, 
constantly recurring to it, now with awful pathos 
and again dissembling his own pain with bitter 
irony, as in his note on Shakespeare's Shylock : 

"I, at least, a wandering dreamer of dreams, look- 
ed around me on theEialto to see if I could find Shy- 
lock. I had something to tell him that would have 
pleased him — which was that his cousin. Monsieur 
de Shylock in Paris, had become the proudest baron 
in all Christendom, and had received from their 
Catholic Majesties the Order of Isabella, which was 
originally established to celebrate the expulsion of 
Jews and Moors from Spain. But I found him not 
in the Rialto, so I determined to look for my old 
acquaintance in the synagogue. 

"Though I looked all around in the synagogue of 
Venice, I could nowhere see his face. And yet it 
seemed to me he must be there, praying more fer- 
vently than any of his fellow-believers with stormy, 
wild passion, — yea, with madness ! — to the throne of 

34 



Jehovah, the severe divine Monarch. ... I saw 
him not. But, toward evening, when, according to 
the belief of the Jews, the gates of Heaven are 
closed and no further prayer can enter, I heard a 
voice in which tears flowed as they were never wept 
from human eyes. There was a sobbing which 
might have moved a stone to pity — there were ut- 
terances of agony such as could only come from a 
heart which held shut within itself all the martyr- 
dom that an utterly tormented race had endured for 
eighteen centuries. It was the death-rattle of a 
soul which, nearing its death, sinks to the ground 
before the gates of Heaven. And this voice seemed 
to be well known to me, — as if I had heard it long, 
long ago, when it wailed just as despairingly, 
* Jessica, my child !' " 

Now for the other mood, and let us not forget 
that with Heine the mood of the moment is su- 
preme. We have but to take what the gods give us 
and be thankful. Also the strange mingling of 
irony, truth, humor and pathos is the chief mark of 
our poet's genius — the one thing in which he is least 
imitable. 

"There lives at Hamburg, in a one-roomed lodg- 
ing in the Baker's Broad Walk, a man whose name 
is Moses Lump. All the week he goes about in the 
wind and rain, with his pack on his back, to earn 
his few shillings. But when on Friday night he 
comes home, he finds the candlestick with seven 
candles lighted, and the table covered with a fine, 
white cloth. And he puts away from him his pack 
and his cares, and he sits down to table with his 

35 



squinting wife and yet more squinting daughter, 
and eats fish with them — fish that has been dressed 
in beautiful white garlic sauce; says therewith the 
grandest psalms of King David; rejoices with his 
whole heart over the deliverance of the Children of 
Israel out of Egypt ; rejoices, too, that all the wicked 
ones who have done hurt to the Children of Israel 
have ended by taking themselves off; that King 
Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Haman, Antiochus, Ti- 
tus, and all such people are dead, while he, Moses 
Ijump, is yet alive and eating fish with his wife and 
daughter. He contemplates with satisfaction his 
candles, which he on no account will snuff for him- 
self. And I can tell you, if the candles burn a little 
dim, and the snuffers- woman, whose business it is to 
snuff them, is not at hand, and if Rothschild the 
Great were at that moment to come in — with his 
brokers, bill-discounters, agents and chief clerks 
with whom he conquers the world — and were to say, 
^Moses Lump, ask me what favor you will and it 
shall be gTanted,' — I am convinced Moses Lump 
would quietly answer, 'Rothschild, snuff me those 
candles!' And Rothschild the Great would ex- 
claim, 'If I were not Rothschild, I would be Moses 
Lump !' " 

•1? "l- 4* •!• 

Heine's political sense was indeed as sane and 
shrewd as his wit was keen. He has given us no 
better example of it than the following : "An Eng- 
lishman loves Freedom as he loves his lawfully 
wedded wife. He regards her as a possession and 
if he does not treat her with special tenderness, yet, 

36 



if need be, he knows how to defend her. A French- 
man loves Freedom as he does his chosen bride ; he 
will commit a thousand follies for her sake. A 
German loves Freedom as he does his old grand- 
mother. And yet, after all, no one can tell how 
things may turn out. The grumpy Englishman, in 
an ill temper with his wife, is capable some day of 
putting a rope around her neck. The inconsistent 
Frenchman may become unfaithful to his adored 
mistress and be seen fluttering about the Palais 
Royal after another. But the German will never 
quite abandon his old grandmother. He will al- 
ways keep for her a nook by the chimney corner 
where she can tell her fairy tales to the listening 
children." 

Save the Chinese, no people have excelled the Ger- 
mans in attachment to the idea of kingship by di- 
vine right, with its related blessing of a hereditary 
aristocracy. It is still believed that such is the 
form of government most acceptable in the sight of 
Heaven, where once the socialists and republicans 
under Lucifer caused a serious insurrection, which 
was put down only after the greatest trouble by 
Michael, first of all legitimists. Hence the peculiar 
favor with which the good Lord is supposed to re- 
gard those earthly governments patterned upon the 
model established by Himself. 

This was a favorite theme with our poet, who hat- 
ed dulness and pretence, stupidity and intolerance 
wherever he found them, but most bitterly of all in 
the trappings of prescriptive authority. No strong- 
er proof of German passivity could be adduced than 

37 



that it seems to have withstood even the poisoned 
shafts of Heine's satire and ridicule. 

It is, however, not unusual to find the spirit of 
revolt most keenly alive under a general appearance 
of submission and compliance; so we need not doubt 
that there were hearts in Germany which eagerly 
treasured up Heine's burning words against the 
mediaeval body-of-death under which the nation 
lay — alas! for the greater part, still lies. 

Never did our poet preach the new gospel of 
democracy with keener effect than in the following 
story taken, as he says, out of the life of Charles V.* 

"The poor Emperor was taken prisoner by his 
enemies, and thrown into a wretched prison. I 
think it was in the Tyrol. He sat alone there in 
all his wretchedness, forsaken by all his knights 
and his courtiers, and no one came to help him. I 
do not know if in those days he had the curd-white 
face with which Holbein represents him in his pic- 
tures. But that prominent underlip, the sign of 
a disdain for mankind, was then, undoubtedly, more 
protruding than in his pictures. He had good cause 
to despise the people who fluttered so devotedly 
around him in the sunshine of his good fortune, 
and who left him solitary in his obscurity and his 
misfortune. Suddenly the prison door opened, and 
a cloaked man entered, and when the cloak was 
thrown aside the King recognized his faithful Kunz 
von der Kosen, the court fool. This man brought 
him consolation and advice, and he was the court 
fool. 



*A slip for Maximilian. 

38 



" 'Oh, German Fatherland ! Oh, dear German 
people ! I am thy Kunz von der Rosen. The man, 
whose peculiar office was to make the time pass for 
thee, and who only amused thee in thy good days, 
presses into thy prison, in the time of thy misfor- 
tune. Here, under my cloak, I bring thee thy 
strongest sceptre, thy beautiful crown. ... Do you 
not recognize me, my Emperor? If I can not free 
thee, at least will I comfort thee, and thou shalt 
have some one near thee with whom thou canst 
speak of thy direful sorrows, one who loves thee, 
and whose best jokes and best blood are at thy ser- 
vice. For thou, my people, art the true Emperor, 
the rightful lord of the land. Thy will is sovereign, 
and far more legitimate than that purple vested Tel 
est ndtre plaisir, which invokes a divine right with- 
out any other warrant than the foolish prating of 
tonsured jugglers. Thy will, my people, is the only 
rightful source of all power. Though thou liest yet 
in chains, thy right will assert itself at length ; the 
day of deliverance approaches, a new era begins. 
My emperor, the night is ended, and out there be- 
yond the rosy glow of morning dawns.' 

" 'Kunz von der Rosen, my fool, you deceive your- 
self. You perchance mistake a glittering axe for 
the sun, and the morning glow is nought but 
blood.' 

" 'No, my Emperor, it is the sun, though it rises 
in the west. For six thousand years it has always 
risen in the east; it is now full time it should change 
its course.' 



39 



" 'Kunz von der Rosen, my fool, thou has lost the 
bells from off thy red cap, and it has now so strange 
an appearance, that red cap.' 

" 'Alas, my Emperor, at the thought of my mis- 
fortunes I shook my head so furiously, that the 
fool's bells have fallen from my cap ; but it is none 
the worse therefor.' 

" 'Kunz von der Rosen, my fool, what breaks and 
cracks out there?' 

" 'Be still ! It is the carpenter's saw and axe, and 
the doors of your prison will soon be open, and you 
will be free, my Emperor.' 

" 'Am I really Emperor? Alas, it is the fool who 
tells me so !' 

" 'Oh, do not sigh, my dear master. The air of 
the prison renders you fearful; when you are re- 
instated in your power you will again feel the 
hardy Emperor-blood coursing through your veins; 
you will be proud as an emperor, and arrogant, 
and gracious, and smiling, and ungrateful as 
princes are.' 

" 'Kunz von der Rosen, my fool, when I am once 
more free, what wilt thou do?' 

" 'I will then sew new bells on my cap.' 

" 'And how shall I recompense thy fidelity?' 

" 'Ah ! dear master, do not order me to be 
killed!'" 

4. 4. 4. 4, 

In 1831 Heine took a long-meditated step and 
crossed the Rhine — the Jordan which, he said, sep- 
arates the sacred Land of Freedom (France) from 

40 



the Land of the Philistines (Germany). Beyond 
the attraction which Paris offered as the center of 
art and taste, the poet was actuated by other rea- 
sons, sufficiently cogent, in leaving the fatherland. 
I have noted how his prose writings brought him 
under official censure. It was not at all unlikely 
that severer measures might be preparing for him. 
He had received a hint, he tells us, that there were 
irons in the fortress of Spandau which would be 
uncomfortable wearing in the winter. No oysters, 
of which he was fond, were obtainable there, and 
there were no fowl, except flies, which had a habit 
of falling into the soup, and thus making it more 
substantial. Moreover, the poet was strongly 
moved by the July revolution, in which Louis 
Philippe, the Citizen King, succeeded to the Bour- 
bon, Charles the Tenth. The sun in Germany began 
to look to him like a Prussian cockade. "Oh, the 
grand week in Paris !" he exclaims. "The spirit of 
liberty which spread over Germany did, to be sure, 
sometimes overturn the night-lamps, so that the red 
hangings of some thrones were singed and the gold 
crowns grew hot under burning nightcaps. But the 
old catchpolls in the pay of the police soon brought 
out their fire-buckets, and they snuff about more 
watchfully than ever and forge stronger chains. 
And I notice that invisible prison walls, thicker 
than ever, are rising round the German people." 

On the second day of May, 1831, he arrived in 
Paris. His reputation had preceded him, and 
gained for him the entree to the first literary cir- 
cles. Heine was then in his thirty-second year, in 



41 



the full vigor of health, and so handsome as to win 
from Theophile Gautier the title of the German 
Apollo. Among the notables who welcomed the 
poet to Paris were Meyerbeer, George Sand, Gau- 
tier, Michelet, Dumas, Sainte Beuve, Quinet, Ger- 
ard de Nerval, Ludwig Boerne, Schlegel and Hum- 
boldt. Heine's contentment in his new sphere, in 
the Capital of Intellect, far removed from the petty 
German censors, is best described by his own 
famous phrase to Ferdinand Hiller, the composer, 
returning to Germany. "If any of my friends ask 
about me," he said, "say I feel like a fish in water; 
or, rather, when one fish in the ocean asks another 
how he is feeling, he gets the answer, 'I feel like 
Heine in Paris.' " 

Heine, a born man of letters, as Matthew Ar- 
nold calls him, at once entered upon the second and 
more important period of his literary career. His 
letters to German newspapers, his reviews and other 
prose writings, put him in possession of an assured 
income. There was, besides, an allowance from 
Uncle Salomon — not a munificent one, indeed, but 
still useful and acceptable. It is said the poet 
was also, for a considerable time, in receipt of 
a pension from the French Government, and the 
story lent color to some unworthy aspersions 
cast upon him by his own countrymen. The 
fact seems to have been that Heine was carried 
on the list of foreign refugees whom the French 
Government assisted, through motives of poli- 
cy. That the poet never performed a sinister 
service nor one in any way impeaching his 

42 



integrity as a man and a patriot, has long since been 
made clear to his most invidious critics. 

In the account which he drew up concerning his 
estrangement from Ludwig Boerne — his fellow- 
countryman, and a zealous, if intemperate, patriot 
— Heine repudiated the charges above noted. "Do 
you hold out from the grave an imploring hand?" 
he cries. "I give you mine without malice. See 
how white and clean it is ! It has never been soiled 
by the clasp of the mob or the gold of the people's 
enemies." 

True, as it is, that Heine lacked stableness of pur- 
pose, he at least never abjured his liberal creed. Be- 
longing to the aristocracy of mind, he was yet a 
leader and a prophet in the great democratic move- 
ment. With all his admiration for Napoleon, he 
was wont to say that he followed him absolutely 
only up to the 18th Brumaire. Heine's political 
vision was marvelously keen and his deductions or- 
iginal and just. Scarcely any portion of his work 
is more interesting than the political reflections and 
observations injected into his "History of the Ro- 
mantic School," his "Religion and Philosophy in 
Germany," and sprinkled over his miscellaneous 
writings. 

With his protean humor and fatal facility of 
satire, it was only to be expected that, sooner or 
later, Heine would give mortal offence to most of 
his liberal friends, as well as many of his compat- 
riots. The affair with Ludwig Boerne, which, after 
the apostasy, I would rather wipe out than any 
other passage in Heine's life — drew him into a duel. 

43 



There were other quarrels, hideously vulgar, and 
ah, how unworthy of the high-strung, sensitive poet ! 
These are, however, only the shadows in the pic- 
ture. A curious student may now, perhaps, by an 
effort, recall the names of the men who quarreled 
with Heine on the score of backsliding in his politi- 
cal or religious faith. No one can estimate the im- 
mense influence which his writings have had in 
favor of liberal ideas in Germany and throughout 
the world. 

^M rjLt M^ Aj 

In the year 1841 Heine wrote to his sister : "On 
the 31st of August I was married to Mathilde Cres- 
zentia Mirat, with whom I have quarreled every day 
these six years." The poet's union with the amia- 
ble Frenchwoman contributed to the small sum of 
happiness reserved for his last years. A terrible 
and insidious disease, consumption of the spinal 
marrow, showed itself as early as 1845, in a partial 
paralysis which gradually extended over the whole 
system. Then in 1848 began for the stricken poet 
the tragedy of the mattress grave, and the crown of 
an unexampled agony was added to the supreme 
laurel of poesy. Even as early as 1846 Heine wrote 
to his friend, Heinrich Laube: "If you do not find 
me here — faubourg Poissonniere No. 41 — please 
look for me in the cemetery of Montmartre — not in 
Pere La Chaise, which is too noisy for me." 

Our Heinrich was surely no saint, yet his awful 
sufferings brought to light in his character unsus- 
pected resources of firmness, sweetness and resigna- 

44 



tion. His chief anxieties were, first, for his wife, 
that she should not be left by his death without a 
provision ; and then, for his old mother in Germany, 
the "old woman by the Dammthor," that she should 
not learn of his terrible misfortune. His woeful 
state was, for some time, needlessly embittered by 
the heartless conduct of his cousin Carl, who re- 
fused to pay an allowance promised by Uncle Sal- 
omon, now dead, but which the latter had omitted to 
provide in his will. Finally Carl yielded the point, 
but he first made terms with the poet relative to the 
latter's treatment of the Heine family in his me- 
moirs ; and it was further agreed that the allowance 
should be continued to the poet's widow. 

Dark as was Heine's lot, in those terrible last 
years, the solace of his genius remained to him. 
With death at his pillow and the sentient world of 
light and life and joy shut out from him, his genius, 
unconquered, yet rose to new heights — as if he 
would gather fresh laurels to be laid on his bier. 
"Like a dead man, the living poet was nailed in his 
coflan," writes Theophile Gautier, "but when we 
bent listening over him, we heard poetry ringing 
from under the pall." 

But the poet himself is the best witness of his 
own agony. Listen: 

"My body is so shrunken away that hardly any- 
thing but my voice is left, and my bed reminds me of 
the sounding grave of the enchanter Merlin in the 
Broceliande forest in Brittany, under the tall oaks 
whose tops rise like green flames into heaven. Ah, 
friend Merlin, I envy you those trees, with their 

45 



cool breezes, for no green leaf flutters over my mat- 
tress grave in Paris." 

Again : "I am no more a Hellene of jovial life and 
portly person, laughing cheerfully down on dismal 
Nazarenes — only a poor death-sick Jew !" 

But not dead yet, no, not dead ! For he cries out 
with the courage of immortal mind — "Though I am 
sick unto death, my soul has not suffered mortal 
hurt. It is a drooping and an athirst, but not yet 
withered flower, which still has its roots firmly 
planted in the ground of truth and love." 

And the terrible likeness he found for his afflic- 
tion in the leper of the "Limburg Chronicle." Hear 
again: "In 1480, throughout all Germany, songs 
were sung and whistled that were sweeter and love- 
lier than any that were ever heard before in the 
German land. But, says the chronicle, a young 
priest who had the leprosy had written these songs, 
and had withdrawn himself from all the world into 
a desert. These lepers of the Middle Ages, thrust 
out from all human intercourse, wandered about, 
wrapped from head to foot, a hood over their faces, 
carrying a rattle, called a Lazarus bell, with which 
they gave warning of their approach, so that aU 
might draw aside from the way. . . . Often, in 
my sad visions of the night, I think I see before me 
the poor priest of the 'Limburg Chronicle,' my 
brother in Apollo, and his suffering eyes gleam 
strangely from beneath his hood ; but in a moment 
he glides away, and, like the echo of a dream, I hear 
the sharp tones of the Lazarus bell." 



46 



It is a strange picture, called up by the sufferings 
of the poet — his mind triumphing over the decay of 
his body — his genius marking new achievements — 
his mordant wit and terrible irony active to the last. 
The ruling passion, strong even in death, was never 
more signally illustrated. His last word is a jest — 
"God will pardon me; it is his trade!" 

But there is a relief to the tragedy of the mattress- 
grave, which were else too painful to contemplate. 
The cheerfulness of the dying man, the amazing vig- 
or of his mind, the undaunted bravery of his spirit 
— ^these may well detain us for a brief space before 
we turn away from that solemn scene. 

To the doctor who asked him if he could whistle, 
using the French word which means also to hiss 
{siffier), the poet gasped, "Alas, no! not even a 
comedy of M. Scribe's." When Berlioz, the com- 
poser, came to see him, shortly before the end, the 
poet exclaimed, "What ! a visitor ! Berlioz was al- 
ways original!" And the good-natured Mathilde, 
often made the sport of his playful humor, content- 
ed herself with saying placidly: "Very well, my 
dear, have your joke, but you know you can not do 
without me." 

Once his Nonotte, as he called her, went out for 
a drive, and was gone so long that the poet pretend- 
ed his first thought was that she had eloped from 
her sick husband with some cunning Lothario. 
Then he sent the nurse to her room to see if Cocotte, 
her pet parrot, was there. Yes, indeed, Cocotte, 
was there, and his heart beat freely again. "For 



47 



without Cocotte," he adds, with a touch of sly 
malice, "the dear woman would never leave me." 

Well, she never did leave him, and, so far as we 
know, she never dreamed of such a thing, great as 
was her burden. Poor Mathilde! My heart goes 
out in sympathy to her, who was so near the poet, 
and who is treated with such scant courtesy by the 
great man's biogTaphers. I believe she suffered 
more than we know. She was not a literary wom- 
an, and she could not leave the world a memoir 
of that mattress-grave tragedy, as did another wom- 
an, whose presence at her husband's bedside brought 
him more comfort than it brought her. She could 
only retire, at odd times, when her care was not re- 
quired by the sick man, and talk to her parrot, or, 
perhaps, cry softly to herself. . . . 

But the end of that long martyrdom was drawing 
near. Now the poet writes, or dictates — for his 
sight is nearly gone and his paralyzed fingers can 
not guide the pen : "My body suffers much, but my 
soul is as placid as a lake, and sometimes the most 
beautiful sunrises and sunsets are reflected in it." 
He makes his will, his latest thought anxious for 
poor Mathilde: "Farewell, thou German fatherland 
— land of riddles and sorrows : farewell, you kindly 
French people, whom I have loved so much." Thus 
he fell asleep, February 17, 1856. The funeral was 
simple, without any religious ceremony, as the poet* 
had desired. The mourners were Theophile Gau- 
tier, Alexandre Dumas the elder, Paul de St. Victor, 
and Mignet. Dumas wept; Gautier, seeing the 



48 



great casket and the shrunken corpse, recalled the 
poet's own lines : 

Do you know why the coffin 
So heavy and wide must be? 

Because in it I laid my love, 
And Avith it my misery ! 

The poet was buried in Montmartre cemetery, ac- 
cording to his Avish. Over his grave is a simple 
stone, with the inscription, "Henri Heine." The 
mother who brought him into the world which he 
filled Avith his fame, survived him three years. 

Heine, in his fine comparison of Goethe and 
Schiller, Avrote : "Goethe's poems do not beget deeds 
as do Schiller's. Deeds are the children of the 
word and Goethe's fair words are childless. That 
is the curse of all that is the product of art alone." 

Here is a profound truth by virtue of which Heine 
himself exercises a more vital influence than does 
the sovereign of German literature. Heine, in- 
deed, more potently represents his time, its aspira- 
tion, its revolt against tradition and dogma and all 
cramping prescription. Hence Matthew Arnold 
calls him the paladin of the modern spirit. The 
poet truly describes himself as a son of the Kevolu- 
tion. "Poetry has always been with me only a sac- 
red plaything," he says. "I have ever placed but 
slight value on poetic fame, and my future repute 
troubles me not at all. But if ye will do me honor, 
lay a sword upon my coffin lid, for I was a brave 
soldier in the Av^ar of the liberation of humanity!" 

49 



Doubtless it required more courage and self-sac- 
rifice to live the life that Heine lived — no matter 
how often it fell below the mark — than to wear a 
gold chain and be chancellor at Weimar^ It is a 
great distinction to be a great poet. Add to this 
the glory of leading and inspiring the onward march 
of humanity — of suffering also in that supreme 
cause — ^and the measure of earthly greatness is 
filled. 

This crowning honor, I believe, can not fairly be 
refused to the memory of Heinrich Heine. 




50 



Dr. Maginn and Father Trout. 



William Maginn, 




AM to talk to you of two famous Irishmen 
who lived merrily and in their earthly 
course added much to the world's stock 
of enjoyment. We shall not, I trust, be 
the less interested in the story that, after making 
the world largely their debtor, these two died sadly 
enough, taking at last a tribute of tears from thous- 
ands of hearts which they had delighted with the 
frolic freedom of their genius. And, in truth, what 
moral is more trite than this — the merry man drop- 
ping at the end of the play his humorous mask and 
showing us his own tristful face behind the antic 
visage of Harlequin? Perhaps the poor mime was 
sad through it all — only the children are entirely 
deceived by the patches and paint. 

In the change of literary fashions and the clamor 
of new voices, some courage may be required to 
attempt an hour's entertainment with two common- 
ly neglected writers. I say neglected, although edi- 
tions of their books are printed from time to time, 
and the audience of elect minds never fails them. 

It is enough that the men with whom we have to 
deal have gained an honorable place in the litera- 
ture of the last century. If you do not remark their 
books on every railway stand, or in the catalogue of 
every circulating library, you must not, therefore, 

51 



conclude that they have no warrant to speak to you. 
Nay, I make bold to observe that they require you 
to bring your best to them, and that one's best is 
not, perhaps, always worthy of their acceptance. 

Still it remains true that the vogue of many more 
recent literary reputations, far less worthy on 
grounds of high merit, is not for the Doctor or the 
Padre, beloved though they be of an appreciative 
and attached audience. Whether indeed such a 
condition were desirable, offers a basis for argu- 
ment, had we time and patience to go into it. Hav- 
ing long since attained that Nirvana which awaits 
the tired heart and brain, the Doctor and the Padre 
rest indifferent to the awards of gods and columns. 
Nor are they posthumously pursued by the literary 
syndicates — so their portion great or small of im- 
mortal fame is in no danger of being vulgarized. 
The syndicates may dissent, but I can see some- 
thing to be envied in this. 

O'Connell used to say that you could kick a better 
orator tJian himself out of any bush in Ireland. 
Dr. Maginn and Father Prout, on a similar princi- 
ple, might be reckoned the two wittiest Irishmen of 
the last century, if wit were not so generally accred- 
ited to the race which claims them. They were con- 
temporaries, though Prout lived quite into our own 
time and Maginn died twenty years before him. 
There was a strange resemblance in their mental 
gifts, their literary acquirements, even their mu- 
tual antipathies and prejudices. The one was 
almost the analogue of the other. Both were good 
Irishmen, yet both were strong Tories. The one 

52 



was a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and, in 
spite of much that was uncanonical in his character, 
remained true to the ancient faith of his fathers. 
The other was as stout a Protestant as Doctor John- 
son. 

Maginn used to quote with half-serious approval 
the proposition of a certain Sir Joseph Yorke, to 
scuttle the Island of Sorrows and leave it under 
water for twenty-four hours, as an effectual cure 
for its political disorders. It may be observed that 
the Doctor seldom left himself under water for so 
long a period. 

Prout was of the opinion that Tom Moore's Melo- 
dies had done more to bring about Catholic Eman- 
cipation than all the tremendous moral suasion of 
O'Connell, and he affected to hold the methods of 
the gTeat agitator in abhorrence. I suspect his 
Toryism was only skin-deep, however, — not at 
all the robust article of Maginn — for we know 
that he (Prout) gloried in a Limerick ances- 
tor. The politics of both men is a curious 
study, but it may not detain us, since we are 
chiefly concerned with their literary character. 
And here, as already suggested, the analogy be- 
tween these two famous men is most striking. 
There is no great disparity between the productions 
of their genius. Nature almost seems to have 
struck them both from the same die. But let us 
begin with Maginn. 

"Here, early to bed, lies kind William Maginn," 
wrote Lockhart, in 1842. I wish you to keep in 
mind that simple obituary penned by the noble son- 

53 



in-law of Walter Scott. "Kind William Maginn !" 
Yes, it was kind William Maginn who wrote : "Great 
and wise men liave loved laughter. The vain, the 
ignorant and the uncivilized alone have dreaded or 
despised it. Let us imitate the wise where we may. 
Let our Christmas laugh echo till Valentine's day ; 
our laugh of St. Valentine till the first of April ; our 
April humor till May-day, and our merriment till 
midsummer. And so let us go on from holiday to 
holiday, philosophers in laughter, at least, till, at 
the end of our century, we die the death of old 
Democritus — cheerful, happy and contented, sur- 
rounded by many a friend, but without an enemy, 
and remembered principally because we have never 
either in life or in death, given pain for a moment 
to anyone that lived!'' 

•i" 4? 4? 4? 

Ireland is a very small country, to be sure, as a 
matter of square miles, though we have been obliged 
to hear so much of it ; but it does seem amazing that 
so many famous and illustrious Irishmen should 
have to be credited to the city and county of Cork. 
A fair city is Cork, with one of the most beautiful 
sea-ways in the world leading to her doors. Alas! 
many of those who have loved her and owed to her 
their birth, have gone out oftener upon that shin- 
ing track than they have returned. We shall hear 
presently of one who carried a wistful memory of 
her during years of exile in alien lands until at 
last it found expression in a song which has 
wreathed his name with hers in an unfading laurel. 

Maginn and Father Prout were both born in this 

54 



delectable city of Cork. So was their friend, Mac- 
lise, the painter, the Alfred Croquis of Fraser's 
Magazine, and the worthy associate of Maginn in 
making the famous "Gallery of Literary Charac- 
ters." Maclise is also memorable as the friend of 
William Makepeace Thackeray, greatest of all who 
sate in the brilliant circle of Begina."^ 

It would be easy, by the way, to draw up a cata- 
logue of eminent Corkonians. There was "Honest 
Dick" Milliken, who wrote the celebrated "Groves 
of Blarney," — now, alas ! unsung, yet still potent to 
keep his honest name from oblivion. There was 
Barry, the painter, and Sheridan Knowles, the 
dramatist; there was Thomas Davis, heart of fire 
and tongue of gold, and poor Callanan, bard of 
Gougaune Barra. But, indeed, to rehearse the roll 
of Cork's illustrious sons might, in the end, become 
as tiresome as the catalogue of the ships in Homer. 
Modesty forbids my mentioning the name of a cer- 
tain unimportant person (here peeping over your 
shoulder) who has the privilege of claiming Cork 
as his birthplace. 

So William Maginn was born in Cork, the son 
of a schoolmaster who knew vastly more than 
Goldsmith's immortal pedagogue, for he taught the 
classics and other useful knowledge, and conducted 
withal a flourishing academy. But nothing about 
the academy flourished at the rate that young Ma- 
ginn did in scholarship. The mere summary of his 
acquirements before he was eighteen is appalling. 
Maginn pere knew his son was a prodigy, and with 



*Fraser's Mag'azine. 

55 



true Irisli pride set himself to bring out all that was 
in him. You remember how Dr. Blimber used to 
"bring on" the young gentlemen under his tute- 
lage. It probably wasn't a circumstance to the 
bringing on of young Maginn. He gTaduated from 
Trinity College, Dublin, before he was eighteen. 
He died under fifty, and while still a young man he 
had mastered the Latin, Greek, German, Hebrew, 
Sanscrit, Syriac, Irish or Gaelic, French, Spanish, 
Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish and Magyar lan- 
guages. It is also certain, as we know from his 
works, that he learned soundly and well the English 
tongue, which is quite an accomplishment of itself. 
But there is, incredible as it may seem, no reason to 
doubt that his knowledge of all the languages 
named was exact and profound. His translations, 
serious and burlesque, sufficiently attest his mas- 
tery of the classic tongues. His essays on the plays 
and learning of Shakespeare show his command of 
the splendid resources of our English speech. Ed- 
ward Keuealy, who has left us a touching memoir 
of Maginn, and who was himself a linguist of great 
attainments, in a letter to Sir Robert Peel charac- 
terized Maginn as "the most universal scholar of 
the age.'' And Lockhart wrote of him : 

"Be a Bentley, if you can, but omit the brutality ; 
rival Parr, eschewing all pomposity; outlinguist 
old Magliabecchi, and yet be a man of the world; 
emulate Swift in satire, but suffer not one squeeze 
of his saeva indignatio to eat your own heart; be 
and do all this — and the Doctor will no longer be 
unique." 

56 



Unhappily for Maginn's status in literature, this 
enormous versatility was purchased at the cost of 
more enduring performance. The Doctor did too 
many things well to achieve a surpassing success 
in any single line. As he himself Avould have said, 
with whimsical pedantry, the labor was too auto- 
schediastical. It has been said that men made good 
books out of his table talk — without crediting him, 
of cotirse. The possessor of one talent is not seldom 
more fortunate than he who has ten. Maginn wrote 
the first of the famous Nodes Amhrosianae papers, 
and many of the succeeding series which through 
long years delighted the cultivated readers of the 
British Islands. They brought fame and fortune 
to BlackiDOod's Magazine, and more specifically, to 
John Wilson, better known under the pen-name of 
Christopher North. When Maginn's active brain 
was worn out and his generous heart stilled forever, 
the canny Scot forgot to mention tlie obligation. 

Grievous as the fact is to all who wish that genius 
may receive its due, we may be sure that it would 
not have been very distressful to William Maginn. 
The carelessness with which he regarded the fate of 
his productions, may be paralleled only in the case 
of Shakespeare. He rarely gave the authority of 
his name to any of his writings, which he threw off 
with incredible ease and fertility. Yet if only the 
pencil sketches accompanying the "Gallery of Lit- 
erary Characters'' were to survive, they would in- 
sure the fame of Maginn as the most brilliant and 
audacious wit of his generation. 



Not long ago, Mr. Saintsbury, the eminent Eng- 
lish critic, paid a significant tribute to the merits of 
Dr. Maginn, in tracing the early work of Thackeray. 
Maginn was Thackeray's first editor. Many other 
notable literary men confessed the benefits of his 
kindly word and helping hand. Careless of his own 
fame and selfish interest, he was zealous for those 
of others. They say Thackeray satirized him in the 
character of Captain ^handon. I don't believe it. 
I prefer to believe, instead, that the great English 
writer was thinking rather of the erratic, brilliant 
Maginn whom he knew so well, than of Goldsmith, 
when he penned these words : 

"Think of him, reckless, thriftless, vain if you 
like, but merciful, gentle, generous, full of love and 
pity. He passes out of our life and goes to render 
his account beyond it. . . . Think of the noble 
spirits that admired and deplored him. . , . his 
humor delighting us still. . . . his very weaknesses 
beloved and familiar." 

There is a story that Thackeray, in his early 
period, long before he had himself caught the ear of 
the town, loaned a goodish sum of money to Maginn 
— which, of course, was never repaid — and that the 
circumstance aided materially in the dispersion of 
the young man's fortune. Many years afterward, 
when poor Maginn had passed away. Father Prout 
gave the true history of the affair to Blanchard 
Jerrold. Thackeray, he said, was eager to found a 
magazine, which should hold its own with the best. 
He wanted an editor and Prout told him William 
Maginn was his man. A meeting was brought 

58 



about at the Crown Head tavern in Drury Lane — 
Maginn was always the better for business after a 
lubrication. He stipulated for five hundred pounds, 
to be expended in preliminary operations — "clear- 
ing the decks," was the Doctor's idiom. The money 
was advanced, the new literary venture sent forth, 
handseled with all the resource and skill and bril- 
liancy of Maginn. It lived just six months and be- 
queathed an invaluable experience to the future 
author of "Pendennis." 

After all, pecuniary debts lie easier, it may be, 
than literary obligations among the tribe of Scrible- 
rus. I suspect that Barry Lyndon has given a slight 
I. O. U. to Ensign Morgan O^Doherty. 

Maginn in his most surprising feats of genius and 
scholarship must always remain "caviare to the 
general." It is not difficult to see that he could not 
have produced his incomparable burlesques in the 
classic languages by simply swallowing lexicons 
through a long course of years. You may have lit- 
tle Latin, but, with a small share of trouble, you 
can't miss the heroic effect of Maginn's rendering 
of the famous old English ballad of "Chevy Chase" 
into the tongue of Virgil. Who that has ever read 
it, can forget the opening lines? — 

Perseus ex Northumhria 

Vovehat Diis iratis, 
Venare inter dies tres, 

In montihus Cheviatis; 
Contemptis forti Douglaso 

Et omnibus cognatis. 

59 



Or this infinitely comic parody of what Matthew 
Arnold was so fond of calling the grand style? 

dies! dies! dies truw! 

Sic finit cantus primus; 
8i de venatu plura viSj, 

Plura narrare schnus. 

Ht -i* 4" 4* 

There is a well defined Age of Booze in the history 
of English letters and social life. From the middle 
of the Eighteenth century it persists well into the 
Nineteenth. I hasten to say that at no time has the 
great English nation been indifferent to strong 
drink. Men drank hard when William Maginn 
went up to London — they had drunk harder less 
than a generation before. Thackeray glances bril- 
liantly at all this guzzling and profligacy in his 
lecture on the fourth George. Princes of the blood 
were not seldom as drunk as Wapping soldiers. 
Of course the nobility followed suit. The mem- 
bers of the honorable profession of the bar loved 
wine, we are told, as well as the wool-sack. Ladies 
of quality tippled and often had great need of their 
sedan chairs. O tempora! O mores! I wonder if 
all this be really changed in the present year of 
grace, or doth Belgravia remain as a tinkling cym- 
bal? ... 

Poor Maginn drank far more than was good for 
him, on account of his delicate constitution and the 
fact that he was, like Horace, a Mercurial man. 
Charles Lamb, you remember, had the same weak- 
ness and wrote an essay, "The Confessions of a 

60 



Drunkard" which he afterward tried to explain 
away, but which I fear had more truth than poetry. 
I say Maginn drank too much, but it would be 
unjust to paint him as the horrible literary example 
of his age. Other men of his time and company 
drank more — some men, you know, do this better 
than others — and yet contrived to escape reproach. 
The Homeric potations of Kit North and his friends 
are not so much matters of literature as they are 
matters of fact. Maginn wrote a table of drinking 
maxims which had a famous vogue in the clubs. 
Wine and wit are there, contrary to the adage, in 
equal proportions. He has done the trick for us in 
verse, too, and, remembering how many good men 
have had their moments of frailty since Father 
Noah discovered the vine, we shall thank him for 
his jolly song of 

THE WINE-BIBBER'S GLORY. 

Quo me Bacche rwpis tui plenum? 

— Horace. 

If Horatius Flaccus made jolly old Bacchus 

So often his favorite theme; 
If in him it was classic to praise his old Massic 

And Falernian to gulp in a stream ; 
If Falstaff's vagaries 'bout sack and canaries 

Have pleased us again and again ; 
Shall we not make merry on Port, Claret or Sherry, 

Madeira and sparkling Champagne? 

First Port, the potation preferred by our nation 
To all the small drink of the French ; 

61 



'Tis the best standing liquor for layman or vicar, 

The army, the navy, the bench ; 
'Tis strong and substantial, — believe me, no man 
shall 
Good port from my dining room send. 
In your soup — after cheese — every way it will 
please, 
But most tete-a-tete with a friend. 

Fair Sherry, Port's sister, for years they dismissed 
her 
To the kitchen to flavor the jellies; 
There long she was banish'd and well nigh had van- 
ish'd 
To comfort the kitchen maids' bellies, — 
Till his Majesty flxt, he thought Sherry when sixty 

Years old like himself quite the thing : 
So I think it but proper to fill a tip-topper 

Of Sherry to drink to the King. 
Though your delicate Claret by no means goes far, it 

Is famed for its exquisite flavour; 
'Tis a nice provocation to wise conversation. 

Queer blarney or harmless palaver ; 
'Tis the bond of society — no inebriety 

Follows a swig of the blue; 
One may drink a whole ocean and ne'er feel commo- 
tion 
Or headache from Chateau Margoux. 

But though Claret is pleasant to take for the pres- 
ent, 

On the stomach it sometimes feels cold; 
So to keep it all clever and comfort your liver, 

Take a glass of Madeira that's old. 

62 



When't has sailed for the Indies a cure for all wind 
'tis, 

And colic 'twill put to the rout ; 
All doctors declare a good glass of Madeira 

The best of all things for the gout. 

Then Champagne ! dear Champagne ! oh, how gladly 
I drain a 

Whole bottle of Oeil de Perdrix 
To the eye of my charmer, to make my love warmer, 

If cool that love ever could be. 
I could toast her forever — but never, oh never 

Would I her dear name so profane; 
So if e'er when I'm tipsy, it slips to my lips, I 

Wash it back to my heart with Champagne! 

•4" 4" •!? "i* 

The gentle art of literary "^'roasting" seems to 
have declined in virulence since the days of Maginn. 
He was easily the first practitioner of his time, and 
his slashing reviews were long the feature of Fras- 
er's Magazine, and other periodicals. His editors 
have rescued a sufiflcient number of them to give us 
a formidable idea of the Doctor's prowess. The pap- 
ers in which he pretended to expose the plagiarisms 
of Tom Moore are among the most learned and in- 
genious. Maginn was a Tory of the Tories, and it 
was not to be expected that he would bate of his 
edge for the warbler of Lansdowne Houre. Moore 
was greatly annoyed by the Doctor's roguish anim- 
adversions, but he did not proceed to the extreme 
of challenging him to mortal combat, as in the 
memorable passage with Jeffrey. I suspect Moore 

63 



feared the Doctor's terrible wit even more than his 
powder and ball. 

As I have said, literary manners have somewhat 
improved since Maginn plied his merciless pen in 
Fraser's or Bentley's. His affair with Mr. Grantley 
Berkley sets a mark upon the time. It came near 
having as many elements of tragedy as sometimes 
attend the taking off of a Western or Southern edi- 
tor in this glad free land. Mr. Grantley Berkley, 
the younger son of a noble house in whose escutche- 
on there was a very recent and ugly bar sinister, 
wrote and caused to be published a novel of indiffer- 
ent merit. The chief offence of the author, to Ma- 
gi nn's mind, consisted in his expatiating upon the 
ancestral glories of the house of Berkley, in face of 
certain notorious facts. One cannot read Maginn's 
review of the book even at this distance of time 
without a shudder. Father Prout glanced over the 
copy and remarked to James Fraser, publisher of 
the magazine, "Jemmy, this means trouble." And 
it did. 

A novelist of our day would accept such a roast 
as a splendid advertisement. Or he might defend 
himself anonymously and with a heroic show of 
virtue. Mr. Berkley's noble blood would brook no 
amende short of assault and battery. Accord- 
ingly, backed by his brother and a hired bruiser, 
he went after "satisfaction," Finding Fraser alone 
at the publishing office, the three set upon him and 
so grievously injured him that he lived but a short 
time afterward. He lived too long, however, to 
admit of a charge of murder or manslaughter. The 

64 



affair and its subsequent airing in the courts was 
the sensation of London. Before the trial was end- 
ed Dr. Maginn had a hostile meeting with the ag- 
grieved author. Three shots were exchanged with- 
out effect. Fraser's assailants were fined in a small 
amount, and Maginn wrote a vigorous account of 
the whole affair, which, to a present-day reader, ex- 
cels in curious interest the bulk of his works. It 
will always occupy a page in that pleasing history, 
so dear to Addison, of "Man and the Town." 

Maginn had his bit of romance and a sad one 
enough it was. Some who have written upon him 
say it had much to do in confirming the habits of 
dissipation which helped him down the descent of 
Avernus. I have my doubts as to that, but at least 
the theory does no great violence to the Doctor's 
head and heart. His own idea, as Ave know, was 
that a man who would not go to the devil for a 
woman was not good for much. The lady in the 
case was Letitia Elizabeth Landon, an English 
poetess of the thirties, whose verses were once held 
in critical esteem, and whose initials, "L. E. L,," 
were potent to thrill our charming grandmothers 
in that far-off sentimental time. Miss Landon 
wrote and published more poetry than the Sweet 
Singer of Michigan, but she did not live long 
enough after marriage to take the world into her 
confidence. Thus her passion has a vestal note 
which is lacking to the later and more competent 
lucubrations of the American Sappho. But her 
marriage was a dreadful business to Maginn, who 
admired her prodigiously and, indeed, gave her a 

65 



chance of immortality which the lady's own works 
do not warrant, by inserting a laudatory notice of 
her in the famous "Gallery of Literary Characters." 

Maginn was then able to make or unmake a lit- 
erary reputation. The lady, who really rhymed 
well, was flattered by the great editor's praise. He 
called her the Tenth Muse and proved it with a 
show of poetic imagination which, could the lady 
have claimed as much, would have gone far to con- 
firm her in the title. But however Maginn might 
admire and belaud her and set her up in the estima- 
tion of the literary world, he couldn't marry her, 
for the excellent reason that there was already a 
Mrs. Maginn, of whom we know no more. So the 
Tenth Muse, wearying at last of Platonics, went in 
bravely like every true daughter of Eve to have her 
illusions shattered. She married a Scotch captain 
with a furious temper, who took the poor Muse 
away with him to Cape Coast Castle in Africa, 
where he commanded. There she lived only a few 
months, and the circumstances of her death were 
so strange that it was long believed she had made 
away with herself to escape the violence of her hus- 
band. 

And William Maginn, who had been going down 
for some time, but in an undecided way, so that his 
friends indulged the hope that he might think bet- 
ter of it and retrace his steps, — William Maginn, 
after the death of this woman, went on down hill 
like a man who knew his road and would follow it 
to the end. 



66 



We may not dwell on tlie close of Maginn's life, 
which was as gloomy as its meridian had been bril- 
liant. As Moore says of a more famous Irishman, 
Eichard Brinsley Sheridan, whom Maginn strongly 
resembled in his last evil fortune, he "passed too 
often the Rubicon of the cup." Dunned by bailiffs, 
dragged to the Fleet prison for debt, reduced to the 
meanest shifts to support existence — in reading the 
last sad chapter, one is reminded of the tragedy of 
Savage and that race of ill-fated men of genius in 
whose misfortunes Johnson shared and of whom 
Macaulay describes him as the last survivor. This 
melancholy distinction belongs rather to William 
Maginn. Neglected by the great party which he had 
served so ably and long with his pen, shattered in 
health by privation and disease, — he sank lower 
and lower. After much troubling comes the great 
peace. It came to poor William Maginn in the 48th 
year of his age, in the year 1842, at the town of 
Walton-on-Thames, to which he had retired from 
the great Babel he loved so well. Sad and untimely 
as was that death, and sordid as was the setting 
of the last scene of all, we may not look upon it 
without a solemn interest and pity. Nay, a beam of 
glory lighted up the last hours of the broken man of 
genius. The master passion strong even in death, 
the courage of immortal mind, strikes us mute in 
the presence of this tragedy. Lying with his be- 
loved Homer open upon his breast and unconscious 
of the nearness of the end, he dictated to his faith- 
ful friend Kenealy a translation from the classic 
page. Thus, in a manner thrilling with high emo- 

67 



tion, the Silence came to him: and so, with a rev- 
erent thought, we may leave "kind William 
Maginn." 4' 4? 4? •ib 

Father Trout, 



In the beautiful and well-beloved city of Cork, 
within sound of those bells whose music he has 
bidden us all to hear, was born Francis Sylvester 
Mahony, famous in the world of letters and dear to 
every Irish heart as Father Prout. Let us in the 
short space we may devote to him call often by that 
name which he has made immortal. 

I have noted the neglect into which Maginn and 
Prout have fallen with regard to the great body of 
readers. It is, however, true that Prout's literary 
estate is in much better case than that of his friend 
and contemporary. 

Since their publication, over a half century ago, 
the "Reliques" of Father Prout have steadily ad- 
vanced in literary favor. The suffrages of all com- 
petent scholars award Prout the rank of a classic. 
His love of Horace, his exquisite and varied culture, 
the expression of his native genius, which has been 
defined as a "combination of the Teian lyre and 
Irish bagpipe, of the Ionian dialect and Cork 
brogue," the audacity and fertility of his wit, — all 
cohere in making Prout the delight of the cultivated 
reader. Another fortunate circumstance is, that 
he does not carry too much baggage for immortality. 
There he is for you, within the compass of a tidy 
book, like Horace himself, whom he has so helped 
us to love and understand. Ah, they were kindred 

68 



spirits, tlie little man of Rome and the little man 
of Cork — but we are to consider that later on. 

Francis Mahony's vocation in life was early de- 
termined for him, as has been the laudable custom 
of pious Irish parents. Perhaps the reverence for 
the priesthood is not so marked in any other people. 
It must also be said that this fine sentiment has 
never stood in need of the amplest justification. The 
Irish priesthood have contributed no small share to 
the glory of the Catholic church, and every page of 
Irish history is illustrated with their heroism and 
sacrifice. Hence, the fond ambition to have "a 
priest in the family" has sanctified many a humble 
hearth. Doubtless it has had much to do in weaving 
the destiny of the ill-fated island. Leave it out, and 
the chequered story of Ireland is bafl9.ing in the 
extreme. 

It might have been expected that a lad of such 
parts as young Mahony early displayed would have 
fulfilled the fond hope of his parents and become 
a credit to the Church. The wise Jesuits, his first 
masters, knew better. Trained in the perception of 
character and motive, reading all the secrets of the 
heart with wonderful subtlety, it was seldom they 
erred in tracing the bent of a mind which they had 
assisted to form. It is no slight testimony to their 
acuteness in divining character that they recognized 
in the young postulant for the priesthood the fu- 
ture satirist and that they combated from the first 
his decision to enter the sacred calling. 

But they taught him well, and he never forgot 
the debt he owed them. Careless as he afterwards 

69 



became in scattering the barbed arrows of his wit, 
he never failed in affection and respect for the 
great order of Loyola under whose tutelage he had 
drunk at the founts of classic learning. One of 
the best works of his pen is a vindication of the 
Society of Jesus from the infamous charges hurled 
against it by ignorant prejudice or deliberate mal- 
ice. The march of the Jesuits through Europe for 
two centuries he has likened to the retreat of Xeno- 
phon with his ten thousand. In a paragraph 
worthy of Macaulay, he describes the great Bos- 
suet "coming forth from the College of Dijon, in 
Burgundy, to rear his mitred front at the court of 
a despot, and to fling the bolts of his tremendous 
oratory among a crowd of elegant voluptuaries." 
"They cradled the genius of Corneille," he exclaims. 
"Moliere was the fruit of their classic guidance. 
Scarcely a name known to literature in the Seven- 
teenth century which does not bear testimony to 
their prowess in the province of education.'' And^ 
with a caustic freedom, which his wise preceptors 
would have deprecated, he scores the Franciscan 
Pope Clement XIV for his act in issuing the famous 
Bull of July, 1773, by which the great Society of 
Jesus was suppressed. 

Young Mahony's probation was a long one and, 
as I have said, the end approved the wisdom of his 
masters. At 12 years of age he was sent to the Jes- 
uit College of Saint Acheul, at Amiens, France; 
thence to the Parisian seminary of the Order, and 
still later to the country house at Montrouge. To 
the Jesuit College at Rome he went for philosophy 

70 



and theology, and, for a final test, he was packed off 
to the College of Olongowes, in his native country, 
which was under the charge of the same Order. 

At this last-named institution, Mahony was made 
prefect and master of rhetoric. Whatever doubt 
there might be touching his vocation for the priest- 
hood, there could exist none as to his attainments. 
After a brief but edifying season of grace, the 
young prefect, with some congenial spirits, took a 
day's outing. Potheen somehow figured in the di- 
versions, and, as a result, all had to be carried on 
turf loads to the college at midnight. The reverend 
authorities were justly scandalized, though, I think, 
they might have made more allowance for the 
punch, the smoky devil in which all the papal bulls 
since St. Patrick might neither exorcise nor ex- 
communicate. The leader of misrule was sent back 
to the continent, and spent two years more in Rome, 
disciplining his restless spirit, but (I fear much) 
forgetting to say mea culpa when the bright world 
opened, at rare intervals, its seduction before him. 

At last Francis Sylvester Mahony obtained his 
desire, and, with much misgiving on the part of 
his spiritual fathers, he was ordained a priest of 
the Roman Catholic Church at Lucca. In due time 
he saw and repented his mistake, which cast a 
shadow over his whole after life. With a nature 
intolerant of restraint and a pride of intellect that 
knew no compromise, the humble and laborious 
station of a simple priest was not for Francis Ma- 
hony. A born man of letters, with the need of ex- 
pression came the need of freedom. There was in 



71 



Mahony no tincture of the hypocrite. He refused 
to eat bread at the cost of his self-respect, and, 
turning aside from that which had been the cher- 
ished ambition of his early life, he took up manfully 
the hard portion of the literary worker. 

But note this: He was never what is called an 
"unfrocked priest," a term of reproach perhaps the 
most poignant among the race from which he 
sprang. The act of secularization was voluntary. 
Nor, in his freest Bohemian moments, would he 
permit the slightest aspersion upon the priestly 
character. Though he felt himself spiritually with- 
out the temple, he clung with a strange pride to the 
mere empty name of that sacred calling which had 
cost him so many weary years of probation. 8ac- 
erdos in aeternum ordinem Melchisedec. And to 
the last he read his breviary as faithfully as he read 
his well-beloved Horace and Beranger. 

There is a droll story that Eome once contem- 
plated making a cardinal of Father Prout, as a 
suitable recognition of his eminent literary attain- 
ments. It is said that some members of the Sacred 
College got hold of Front's polyglot Aversion of a 
familiar Irish song and were so delighted with it 
that they instantly moved the Holy Father to con- 
fer the red hat upon an author so deserving. A lit- 
tle examination of the records spoiled the most 
unique proposition in ecclesiastical history. Father 
Front's comment is reported to have been: "All 
roads, they say, lead to Rome, but would it not have 
been droll if I had got myself there through the 
'Groves of Blarney'?" 

72 



The great Archbishop McHale once rebuked a 
censor of Prout with the remark: "The man who 
wrote the Prout Papers is an honor to his country." 
These famous essays, which form the corner-stone 
of Prout's literary reputation, were contributed to 
Frascr's Magazine for the year 1834. They have 
been happily described as a "mixture of Toryism, 
classicism, sarcasm and punch." Among scholarly 
readers the fame of Prout has steadily appreciated, 
and to-day the Prout Papers seem to occupy as 
secure a place as the Essays of Elia, which they far 
surpass in variety of wit and ingenious learning. 

Father Prout was the friend of Dickens and of 
Thackeray. He contributed to Bentley's Miscel- 
lany, of which Dickens was editor, and from Italy 
he sent a congratulatory ode to Thackeray on the 
establishment of the Cornhill Magazine. Dr. Ma- 
gin n and Father Prout had so many things in com- 
mon, as well as an Irish temperament, that one 
looks for some trace of jealousy in their brilliant 
emulation. I am glad to say, as an Irishman, that 
there is not the least suggestion of an unworthy 
feeling between these famous men. Maginn it was 
who introduced Prout to the columns of Fraser's 
and gave him the place of honor during twelve suc- 
cessive issues of the magazine. There is not 
so much love wasted among the literary frater- 
nity as to render nugatory the circumstance 
of this generous friendship. When we remem- 
ber the quarrel between Thackeray and Dickens, 
which divided the British nation into two hos- 
tile camps, we may wonder the more at it. 

73 



Perhaps a falling out between the Doctor and 
the Padre would have been so terrific in its 
literary results — fancy the fulminations of that 
I)olyglot armory! — that both shrank from the en- 
counter. At any rate, these tremendous wits, each 
a born fighter and springing from a race that never 
declines a fight, met, saluted, smiled and passed on 
their earthly pilgrimage. 

Prout took far better care of his literary baggage" 
than did poor Maginn, who wrote for the day and 
the hour, caring nothing for the future. Yet a sim- 
ple song has been more effective in preserving the 
memory of Prout than the wittiest and most learned 
of his writings. Such is the spell of true sympa- 
thy, making the whole world kin. A wanderer for 
years in many lands, singing the songs of stranger 
peoples, he was equally at home on the banks of the 
Tiber, the Arno, the Seine and the Thames. Ah, 
it was to none of these that he poured out the love 
of his heart when he sang the song of the 

"BELLS OF SHANDON," 

With deep affection 
And recollection 

I often think of 

Those Shandon Bells 
Whose sounds so wild would 
In days of childhood 

Fling round my cradle 
Their magic spells: 
On this I ponder 
Where'er I wander, 

74 



And thus grow fonder 

Sweet Cork, of thee, 
With thy bells of Shandon 
That sound so grand on 
The pleasant waters 
Of the river Lee. 

I've heard bells chiming 
Full many a clime in. 
Tolling sublime in 

Cathedral shrine; 
While at a glibe rate 
Brass tongues would vibrate — 

But all their music 

Spoke nought like thine ; 
For memory dwelling 
On each proud swelling 
Of the belfry knelling 

Its bold notes free, 
Made the bells of Shannon 
Sound far more grand on 

The pleasant waters 
Of the river Lee. 

I've heard bells tolling 

Old "Adrian's Mole" in, 
Their thunder rolling 

From the Vatican ; 
And cymbols glorious 
Swinging uproarious 
In the gorgeous turrets 
Of Notre Dame; 
But thy sounds were sweeter 

75 



Than the dome of Peter 
Flings o'er the Tiber 

Pealing solemnly: 

the bells of Shandon 
Sound far more grand on 

The pleasant waters 
Of the river Lee. 

There's a bell in Moscow, 
While on tower and Kiosk, O ! 
In Saint Sophia 

The Turkman gets, 
And loud in air 
Calls men to prayer 

From the tapering summit 
Of tall minarets. 
Such empty phantom 

1 freely grant 'em, 
But there's an anthem 

More dear to me; 
'Tis the bells of Shandon 
That sound so grand on 
The pleasant waters 

Of the river Lee. 

4. 4, 4. 4. 

Prout's habit of "upsetting things into English,'* 
from the modern as well as the classic languages, 
has made the world his debtor and greatly enriched 
his literary legacy. Excellent as are his transla- 
tions from Beranger, Hugo and the Italian poets, 
it is to his renderings from Horace that we must 
award the palm. I have already noted his keen 

76 



sympathy with the most charming and immortally 
young of classic writers. Something of the same 
ine touch is visible in Maginn's Homeric ballads, 
and perhaps these are to be preferred for a rude 
vigor and fidelity to the original. You do not al- 
ways get what you expect from the roguish Father 
Prout. The surprise of his wit is as captivating 
and unexpected as the famous Killarney echo : 

"How do you do, Paddy Blake?" 
"Pretty well, I thank you." 

Nevertheless, of the ma;ny hands that have la- 
bored at Horace — alas! the labor is too often mani- 
fest—the most deft and skillful, I believe, was the 
hand of Prout. The felicity of his verse is no less 
admirable than the sureness of his interpretation, 
and the occasional familiarity which he takes with 
the classic text only gives a zest to the reading. I 
should add that the prose essays in which these 
Horatian renderings are imbedded seem to me 
among the best of their kind. 

Mr. Andrew Lang, who can seldom resist the 
temptation to say a smart thing,— an indulgence 
which may easily be pardoned to a North Briton, — 
remarks that Doctor Maginn in his translations 
from the Greek does not scruple to make Homer 
dance an Irish jig. Whatever truth or point may 
lie in this observation, it is not to be gainsaid that 
Prout's paraphrases of Horace are the better for 
their Milesian flavor. Indeed, they have the some- 
what paradoxical merit of being at once genuinely 
classical and unmistakably Irish. However, when 

77 



they are most Irish, it may be suspected that the 
Padre is but having his "game" with us. That he 
could, when he cared, translate both worthily and 
powerfully, — like a scholar and a poet, — is suffi- 
ciently attested by his unsurpassed rendering of 
Ode II., Lib., 1. Such of my readers as are not 
acquainted with the original will thank me for 
laying this fine version before them, — unquestion- 
ably the tour de force of all Horatian translations. 

ODE II. 

Jam satis terris nivis atque dirae Orandinis, etc. 

Since Jove decreed in storm to vent 
The winter of his discontent. 
Thundering o'er Rome impenitent 

With red right hand, 
The flood-gates of the firmament 

Have drenched the land. 

Terror hath seized the minds of men, 
Who deemed the days had come again 
When Proteus led, up mount and glen. 

And verdant lawn. 
Of teeming ocean's darksome den, 

The monstrous spawn. 

When Pyrrha saw the ringdove's nest 
Harbor a strange unbidden guest. 
And by the deluge dispossesst 

Of glade and grove. 
Deer down the tide with antler'd crest 

Affrighted drove. 

78 



We saw the yellow Tiber, sped 
Back to his Tuscan fountain-head, 
O'erwhelm the sacred and the dead 

In one fell doom. 
And Vesta's pile in ruins spread, 

And Numa's tomb. 
« « * * 

Whom can our country call to aid? 
Where must the patriot's vow be paid? 
With orisons shall vestal maid 

Fatigue the skies? 
Or will not Vesta's frown upbraid 

Her votaries? 

Augur Apollo ! shall we kneel 
To thee, and for our commonweal 
With humbled consciousness appeal? 

Oh, quell the storm! 
Come, though a silver vapor veil 

Thy radiant form ! 

Will Venus from Mount Eryx stoop 
And to our succor hie with troop 
Of laughing Graces, and a group 

Of cupids round her? 
Or comest thou with wild war-whoop, 

Dread Mars! our P^'ounder? 

Whose voice so long bade peace avaunt, 
Whose war-dogs still for slaughter pant, 
The tented field thy chosen haunt. 

Thy child, the K0MAN_, 
Fierce legioner, whose visage gaunt 

Scowls on the foeman. 

79 



Or hath young Hermes, Maia^s son, 
The graceful guise and form put on 
Of thee, Augustus? and begun 

( Celestial stranger ! ) 
To wear the name which thou hast won — 

"Caesar's Avenger?" 

Blest be the days of thy sojourn. 

Distant the hour when Rome shall mourn 

The fatal sight of thy return 

To Heaven again; 
< Forced by a guilty age to spurn 

The haunts of men. 

Rather remain, beloved, adored. 
Since Rome, reliant on thy sword, 
To thee of Julius hath restored 

The rich reversion: 
Baffle Assyrians hovering horde, 

And smite the Persian ! 

Now, let us take, — and with this selection we 
must be perforce content, — the most charming song 
of all classical antiquity, the famous Ode for Lalage, 
which Father Prout has rendered with inimitable 
grace and fidelity. 

ODE XXII. 
Integer vitae scelerisqiie purus. 
Aristius! if thou canst secure 
A conscience calm, with morals pure, 
Look upward for defence ! abjure 

All meaner craft — 
The bow and arrow of the Moor, 
And poisoned shaft. 

80 



What tho' thy perilous path lie traced 
O'er burning Afric's boundless waste, 
Of rugged Caucasus the guest, 

Or doomed to travel 
Where fabulous rivers of the East 

Their course unravel! 

Under my Sabine woodland shade. 
Musing upon my Grecian maid. 
Unconsciously of late I strayed 

Through glen and meadow, 
When lo ! a ravenous wolf, afraid, 

Fled from my shadow. 

No monster of such magnitude 
Lurks in the depth of Daunia's wood. 
Or roams through Lybia unsubdued. 

The land to curse — 
Land of a fearful lion-brood 

The withered nurse. 

Waft me away to deserts wild. 
Where vegetation never smiled, 
Where sunshine never once beguiled 

The dreary day. 
But winters upon winters piled 

For aye delay : 

Place me beneath the torrid zone 
\\Tiere man to dwell was never known, 
I'd cherish still one thought alone, 

Maid of my choice! 
The smile of thy sweet lip — the tone 

Of thy sweet voice! 

81 



Blanchard Jerrold has described the author of 
the Prout papers as of a race now extinct, "like 
the old breed of wolf-dogs." It is at least certain 
that the pattern of his wit appears to have been lost. 
"An odd, uncomfortable little man," says Jerrold 
elsewhere, "with a roguish Hibernian mouth and 
grey, piercing eyes." That is also a good bit of 
description, showing the free touch of a contempor- 
ary, which pictures for us the "short, spare man, 
stooping as he went, with the right arm clasped in 
the left hand behind him ; a sharp face — a mocking 
lip and an ecclesiastical garb of slovenly appear- 
ance. Such was the old Fraserian," adds the writer, 
"who would laugh outright at times, quite uncon- 
scious of bystanders, as he slouched toward Temple 
Bar." 

Front's letters from Italy, contributed to the Lon- 
don Daily News during the brief period of Dickens' 
editorship, have, as we might naturally expect, 
rather a literary than a journalistic value. Never- 
theless they are worthy documents of the time, and 
the Padre shows himself no Tory in recording the 
progress of Italian liberation. Meantime, Ireland 
was struggling along in the old way (which has 
not yet been entirely changed for a better), and 
Prout evinced that his sympathies were not with a 
majority of his own countrymen by inditing a fierce 
lampoon upon O'Connell. Swift himself never 
dipped his pen deeper in gall than did Prout when 
he wrote the vitriolic stanzas of the "Lay of Laz- 
arus." Doubtless it was inspired by honest feeling; 
but, as an Irishman, he might have spared adding 

83 



to his country's shame. To this it may be cynically 
rejoined that, as an Irishman, he couldn't help do- 
ing it. 

Much has been written on the subject of Front's 
residence in Paris, where, during the later years 
of his life, he was a marked figure. Speaking the 
French language perfectly, he came to be regarded 
by the Parisians as one of their own notables. I 
need not here remark that there was a truly Gallic 
lightness in his wit, which has induced one of his 
biographers to describe his mental make-up as a 
compound of Eabelais and Voltaire. It is certain 
that he took kindly to the gay Parisians, whose 
love of novelty and child-like enthusiasms enchant- 
ed him. Among them he passed his closing years 
happily enough, earning, with his pen, as corres- 
pondent for the London News or Glohe suflicient 
for his needs. He had his lodging, and a poor one 
enough, in the Rue des Moulins, running out of 
Thackeray's famous "New Street of the Little 
Fields," forever associated with the unctuous bal- 
lad of the "Bouillabaisse." Here sometimes the 
solitary little man received the few whom he admit- 
ted to the near circle of his friendship. Ah, what 
would not one give to have made one of a group 
about the chair of him who created the Rev. Andrew 
Prout, the lone incumbent of Watergrasshill, in 
the delectable county of Cork; the Rev. Father Ma- 
grath, elegiac poet, and the Rev. Father Matt Eor- 
rogan, of Blarney ! When the wine flowed, and the 
little man, sure of the sympathy of his audience, 
and justly proud of his fame {non omnis mortar) 

83 



poured forth the treasures of his learning and fancy, 
mingled with the lightnings of that wit which 
scathed wherever it glanced — what a privilege then 
to sit within the friendly beam of his eye, glass to 
glass with the decoctor of immortal punch, the 
wizard of many a night's enchantment ! Ah, kindly 
reader, let us not forget that he lives and bids us 
ever to that favored audience. 

Thackeray, in his Parisian visits, never failed to 
look up his old mentor of Fraser's. Like Prout, the 
author of "Vanity Fair" had served his turn as 
Paris correspondent for one or other of the London 
dailies, and well he knew the life with its gay 
Bohemianism, its ill-regulated bounty and ever- 
recurring short commons. His long and faithful 
friendship with Prout, who was often trying with 
his friends, bears out the truth of those flue lines in 
which Tom Taylor repelled the charge of cynicism 
directed at the historian of Esmond. Thackeray 
had written a book about Paris which the Padre 
pronounced vile, and, indeed, it can hardly be reck- 
oned among the masterpieces of the great author. 
Sometimes, as often chanced with Prout, no matter 
how distinguished his company, a testy habit which 
grew upon him with age, would break out and the 
wit would come dangerously near to rudeness. 
With all his fine scholarship, Prout (to turn his 
own phrase against himself) too plainly revealed 
the "potato seasoned with Attic salt." Jerrold em- 
ploys a less delicate metaphor in remarking upon 
the social errancies of Father Prout. "Prout, in 
his convivial moments," he says — and I should not 

84 



quote this if he had not elsewhere written nobly and 
appreciatively of our author — "reminds one more 
of Cork than of Rome." We hear of the Padre and 
the creator of Colonel Neivcome hurling Latin ob- 
jurgatives at each other on an evening when Prout 
had mixed too often his favorite concoction of cog- 
nac, lemon and sugar. In such a learned battle the 
Charterhouse boy would scarcely be a match for the 
cunning pupil of the Jesuits. 

Taking a modest liberty with this legend, we may 
conceive the Padre softening again, what with the 
soothing influence of the "element" and the honor 
of such comradeship, and, at an hour which shall be 
nameless, insisting upon seeing his great friend 
home to his lodging hard by in the Place Vendome. 
So, there they go at last, the big man and the small 
— a sight worth seeing, you'll grant me — somewhat 
deviously to be sure, but well enough for all that — 
down the memorable "Street of the Little Fields." 
One of the things that make me love Thackeray is 
his kind and steady friendship for the gifted Irish- 
man, so caustic and sensitive, yet with his own heart 
filled with a great loneliness. 

Now the gossips have much to say about the do- 
ings of famous men, so we learn from more than 
one source that less celebrated guests than William 
Makepeace Thackeray were favored with an un- 
pleasantly near view of the Padre's infirmity and 
carried away an intensely realized sense of the 
Proutian sarcasm. But it seems the entertainment 
was well worth the price, for few but pleasing 



§5 



records remain of those nodes coenaeaque deum in 
the Rue des Moulins. 

Here, near the famous "Street of the Little 
Fields," the solitary little man died, in the month of 
May, 1866. The date seems strangely recent, for we 
naturally associate with him the early thirties, the 
period of the Prout papers. A priest of that faith 
to which, in his heart of hearts, he had never been 
recreant, knelt at his bedside and consoled his 
last moments. And the good Abbe Rogerson tells 
us : "He was as a child wearied and worn out after 
a day's wandering: when it had been lost and was 
found; when it had hungered and was fed again." 

For many years he had lived among the kindly 
French people, whom he loved as the poet Heine 
loved them. But on his death Cork claimed the 
ashes of her famous son. How like the end was, 
after all, to the beginning! For he lies at rest on 
the bank of that pleasant river whose murmur 
mingled with his childish dreams; under the 
shadow of the solemn spire, where the bells of 
Shandon ring down their benediction upon him. 




86 



Guy 7)e Maupassanf, 



i 



HE recent publication, in French, of some 
posthumous fragments of Guy de Mau- 
passant's is not without a mournful in- 
terest for the admirers of that singularly 
gifted and unfortunate genius. And this is the best 
word that can be said for the enterprise of Maupas- 
sant's editors and publishers. Their too obvious 
motive is to make capital out of the morbid curios- 
ity which the fate of this writer has evoked — a cu- 
riosity that seeks to pursue him beyond the grave. 
The editors have much to say as to the importance 
of disclosing the artistic processes of so great a 
writer. It is a specious plea, but the true lover of 
Maupassant will do wisely to avoid these fragments, 
the declared purpose of which is to show him the 
secrets of the Master's workshop. 

I have read these things and I am unfeignedly 
sorry for it. One who wishes to love his mistress 
should not inquire too anxiously into the details 
of her toilet The artistic motive was so dominant 
in Maupassant's work — the sole god indeed of his 
idolatry — that one might conceive such a publica- 
tion inflicting upon him the pangs of a second death. 

And all that we should know of Maupassant's 
"artistic processes" he had himself told us in the 
famous preface to Pierre et Jean, written at the 
height of his powers. It may be worth while to re- 

87 



call briefly the guiding rules of Maupassant's fine 
art, for the benefit of those who regard good writing 
as an easeful occupation, 

•i" 4? 4: 4r 

People who read Maupassant in the current trans- 
lations usually think of him as a man who had a per- 
verted talent for writing indecent stories and whose 
own personal immoralities brought upon him a 
judgment in the shape of paresis and an untimely 
death. The latter part of this view is probably well 
founded, though the physiologist might have some- 
thing to say in the way of rebuttal or, at least, qual- 
ification. The matter of heredity would have to be 
taken into account; it being clear that a man is 
often punished in his venial sins for the graver 
transgressions of an ancestor who had dodged the 
reckoning in his own person. 

Maupassant, it must be allowed, was an immoral 
man in his relations with women — perhaps not 
more so than many a man who leaves the penalty 
of his vices to a future generation. 

As an artist, however, Maupassant has the high- 
est claims to our respect, and we must combat the 
ignorant English idea that he was merely a writer of 
indecent stories. Whatever we may think of his 
choice of subjects, we shall not be able to dispute 
his literary pre-eminence. For example, we are al- 
ways comparing the adjective "great," as between 
Mr. Kipling and some one else, usually to some one 
else's disparagement. Well, Maupassant was near- 
ly always a greater artist than Kipling, though his 
view of life was neither so many-sided nor so whole- 

88 



some as the Englishman's. It must in truth be ad- 
mitted that, literary ethics apart, the body of Mau- 
passant's work is marked by the note of what we 
are now calling degeneracy. This, however, does 
not impair its value as a human document, or as a 
piece of consummate artistry. Nothing could more 
sharply accentuate the note of degeneracy in Mau- 
passant's work than the little story of "Paul's Mis- 
tress" {La Femme de Paul) in the volume^ — untrans- 
lated, so far as I know — bearing the title La Maison 
Tellier. Yet, revolting as is the fnotif of the story, 
so powerfully and graphically is it told, so terribly 
convincing the picture of moral infamy it draws, 
that La Femme de Paul is raised by sheer art to the 
dignity of a classic. So at the end its unspeakable 
revelation offends the literary appreciation no more 
than does Horace's frankness in charging his old 
mistress with libido equarum. Now as the school- 
men have placed the charming lines to Lydia in the 
hands of the "ingenuous youth" of all nations, it 
would seem that, in the last result, the question of 
art is superior to the question of morals. 

Few English writers have satisfied the demands 
of the artistic conscience as rigorously as did Mau- 
passant. In the preface to Pierre et Jean, already 
cited, he says : "After so many masters of nature so 
varied, of genius so manifold, what remains to do, 
which has not been done, what remains to say, 
which has not been said? Who can boast, among 
us, of having written a page, a phrase, which is not 
already, almost the same, to be found elsewhere?" 
Now the man who seeks only to amuse his public, 

S9 



continues Maupassant, by means already known and 
familiar, writes with confidence, his work being in- 
tended for the ignorant and idle crowd. But — 
and here is a truth, oh ye professors of literature ! — 
those upon whom weigh all the past cycles of litera- 
ture, those whom nothing satisfies, whom every- 
thing disgusts, because they dream better, to whom 
everything seems already deflowered, whose work 
gives them always the impression of a labor useless 
and common — they arrive at length to judge the 
literary art as a thing unseizable and mysterious, 
which even the greatest masters have scarcely un- 
veiled. What remains then, he asks, for us who are 
simply conscientious and persevering workers? 
Why, we can maintain our struggle against invinci- 
ble discouragement only by continuous effort — par 
la continuite de Veffort. 

Let the young English literary aspirant read the 
story of Maupassant's seven years' apprenticeship 
to Flaubert — it will be worth more to him than the 
learned lucubrations of Prof. Barrett Wendell or 
many volumes of Kipling. "I know not," said the 
master to his disciple at their first meeting, 
"whether you have talent. What you have shown 
me proves a certain intelligence. But do not forget 
this, young man, that genius, according to Buffon, 
is only a long patience." Prom the author of 
Madame Bovary, Maupassant derived the chief can- 
on of his artistic faith and practice, which may pro- 
fitably be set down here : 

"Whatever may be the thing one wishes to say, 
there is only one phrase to express it, only one verb 

90 



to animate it, and only one adjective to qualify it. 
One must seek then until one find this phrase, this 
verb and this adjective; and one must never be con- 
tent with less, never have recourse to even happy 
frauds (siipercheries) or clowneries of language, in 
order to avoid the difficulty." 

The literal observance of this rule made a greater 
artist of the disciple than of the master. It gave 
Maupassant an almost unique distinction in an 
epoch and a nation peculiarly fertile in gTeat writ- 
ers. He was, and is, the unchallenged master of the 
conte or short story. In English we have no one to 
compare with him except Edgar Poe and Rudyard 
Kipling, both of whom he outclasses by virtue of 
pure artistry. The Frenchman owes his superior- 
ity not merely to the perfection of the phrase, but 
to the variety of his invention and his abnormal 
power of making the reader partake of his impres- 
sions. Poe studiously cultivated the horrible, but 
in tales of this order he achieved an unquestioned 
artistic success only in the Cask of Amontillado. I 
should like to see what Maupassant would have 
done with this story, had it come fresh to his hand. 
Yet he has a score of such, if not so dramatic in con- 
ception as Poe's masterpiece, certainly less peccable 
in other artistic respects. U Apparition is the most 
convincing ghost story ever written; Corsican re- 
venge has never been depicted so briefly and power- 
fully as in his tale of the old woman's vendetta; 
Pierre et Jean is a triumph of art applied to the 
psychology of moral guilt. La Petite Roque is as 
terribly distinctive a success — we can easily im- 

91 



agine how Poe's twiddling detective instinct would 
have spoiled these stories for him; Allouma is the 
last word of a sensualism that is as flagrantly frank 
as it is splendidly poetical ; UHeritage in its polite- 
ly suppressed irony and demure analysis of motive, 
rivals Balzac's veritistic etching of Parisian man- 
ners. 

But what shall I say of Bel-Ami^ the perfect pink 
of cynical scoundrelism, with the profoundly im- 
moral, yet strictly true, lesson of the wicked hero's 
success? Oh, Sandford and Merton! what a con- 
trast is here to the smug hypocrisy of the British 
Philistia ! The man who wrote this book is surely 
damned — but if you do not admire it, pudent read- 
er, you shall not escape artistic damnation. Talk of 
the satire of "Vanity Fair" — a book without a man 
in it ! Look, T pray you, at the victorious Monsieur 
Georges Duroy — pardon! I should say, Du, Roy — 
see how this plenary profligate makes his smiling 
way; conquering and deserting women at every 
turn; j)utting always money in his purse; guilty of 
everything except a blush of shame or a pang of 
remorse. What "green probationers in mischief 
he makes your stock literary villains appear ! The 
fellow is irresistible, too; has such an air that the 
more women he conquers, the more pursue him, 
ladies of approved and matronly virtue as well as 
flaneuses of the pave. How grandly he goes on 
from success to success, until the church itself puts 
the capstone on his triumphal career and le beau 
monde of Paris acclaims his crowning rascality ! 

If the true victory of the artist be to have made 

92 



himself unforgetable in his work, then we may well 
pause at the name of De Maupassant. The copy of 
life which he has given us is one of unique interest, 
— terrible, fascinating, yet repellent. No writer 
moves us to keener curiosity regarding his mental 
processes or the formative influences which went to 
the making of his style and talent. For his rare 
and sinister distinction he paid, as we know, a fear- 
ful price — the man sacrificed himself in the artist. 
This would have appeared to Maupassant a perfect- 
ly logical act, involving neither heroism nor mad- 
ness, since he held to no commandments save those 
of Art. 

The artistic value of that poignant sacrifice, the 
literary value of that deeply etched transcript of 
life, remains and will remain. Tolstoy characteriz- 
es Maupassant as the most powerful of modern 
French writers of fiction. There is, by the way, be- 
tween these two masters, otherwise so strongly con- 
trasted, a great kinship in point of artistic methods. 
Maupassant is perhaps the only Frenchman who 
could conceivably have written Ivan Ilytch, that 
most pitiless yet authentic study of disease and 
death. Perhaps, had Maupassant lived to his full 
maturity — we must not forget that he died a young 
man — he would have come, like Tolstoy, to see life 
with a less morbid and troubled vision. He perish- 
ed to the strains of that Kreutzer Sonata which the 
Russian has long survived and which it is now diffi- 
cult to associate with his name 

I 'have cited from memory only a few of the more 
famous contes — there are a dozen volumes of them, 

93 



not including the novels and other literary efforts. 
An immense quantity of the most strenuously artis- 
tic production ; nothing bad or inept> at least in the 
English degree, shall you find in all these books. 
Maupassant burned the essays made during his long 
apprenticeship to Flaubert. The French people 
have a rigorous artistic sense and do not take kind- 
ly to the English practice of collecting the first 
amateurish effusions of their authors; they wait 
until the bird has learned to sing. 

If the fruits of Maupassant's devotion to his be- 
loved art were less real and apparent, one might 
take more seriously the legend that imputes to him 
an exclusive cult of lubricity. The sins of the 
artist are always exaggerated. In the case of Mau- 
passant, exaggeration was the easier that the artist 
belonged to a race which is remarkable neither for 
continence nor discretion. It is true he confessed 
that "women were his only vice"; but, mindful of 
his eighteen or twenty volumes and his premature 
death, we can allow him a larger measure of charity 
than he claims. This much is certain — Maupas- 
sant was not his own most celebrated hero, as Byron 
liked to have people think he was his own Don 
Juan. Perhaps the creator of Georges DiLVoy 
would have relished the role himself, — if there were 
not books to write and, especially, if Flaubert had 
not laid on him so inflexible a rule of art! I sus- 
pect that the most tragic phase of Maupassant's life- 
tragedy consists in the fearful penalty he paid for 
an indulgence which is not so unusual as the world 
tries to make itself believe. 

94 



t 



^ Lost Toei, 

O almost every man blessed or cursed with 
the instinct of self-expression — blessed 
in so far as the instinct is gratified, 
cursed in so far as it is baulked and 
frustrated — there comes a time, the heyday of youth 
being past, when the vanity of his hope presses upon 
him with a cruel insistence. Even the successful 
artist is not exempt from this trial — we know how 
it embittered the last days of Robert Louis Steven- 
son, in spite of every testimony of esteem, every 
suffrage of recognition that an applauding world 
could shower upon him. How grievous, then, must 
it be in the case of a man who has but merely demon- 
strated the artistic temperament by such slight 
works as are commonly accepted only as an earnest 
of riper and better performance! It is then that 
such a man, having neither secured nor deserved 
from the world that sustaining grace of public ap- 
proval which is called success, begins to see with 
fatal clearness the via dolorosa' of the artistic spirit 
stretching away before his lamentable vision, and 
ever dropping lower unto the sad twilight of age. 
Oh, the bitterness of that first foretaste of inevita- 
ble defeat! No sentence of the world, however 
severe, could affect his courage like this, for, alas I 
this comes from within — the man is judged by that 
inner self from whose decrees there is no appeal. 

95 



Not so had he promised himself in his first sanguine 
elation at hearing the poet's voice within his breast ^ 
nor can he endure to look forward to an old age 
lacking, what must be for him, its chief honor and 
garland : 

Latoe, dones et — precor — Integra 
Cum mente nee turpem senectam 
Degere nee cithara carentem! 

Alas! what hope is there for him of an old age 
rejoiced with the lyre, since now, ere youth be yet 
entirely past, he is tasting that death of the spirit 
which foretokens decay and eternal silence? This 
in truth, is the supreme agony of such a mind — 
worse, far worse, than a hundred deaths of the 
body : yea, worse than the "second death" of Chris- 
tian reprobation. To pass away in the course of 
nature were nothing; a thousand generations 
preach the trite moral of flesh that is reaped like 
grass — any fool's grinning skull will make a jest 
of this brief -lived humanity. But to feel now. when 
it is too late, that he had a voice and did not speak ; 
that he forfeited the most precious of all birth- 
rights ; that he tvas a poet — yes, by God ! — and yet 
failed to make good his divine title, and must now 
forever remain silent, losing his place in the im- 
mortal company of those who can not die from out 
the grateful memory of men — oh, what a thought is 
this for a man to bear with him to his grave ! 

But the world, incredulous of such a soul, is ready 
to cry out upon the recreant: Why, if he had a 
true voice, did he not speak — nay, how could he 

96 



help speaking? Who was there to bid him be si- 
lent? Of marvelous worth, truly, was this poem of 
his, always seeking form and melody in his brain, 
which could never get itself written — this message 
always rising to his lips, which could never get itself 
spoken ! 

Let all the accidents of time and fate plead for 
him. Think you that none was deemed worthy in 
the Olympic strife save him who barely snatched the 
victor's wreath? 

What of the many agonists, nameless now forever, 
who lost the prize, yet made the victor earn his tri- 
umph dear? Only less than his was their skill, 
their strength, their endurance — nay, it may well 
be that in all things they stood equal to him, but 
the strumpet Fortune turned the scale. Even as 
he, had they prepared for the stern trial, with labor 
and sweat and vigil ; and victors they stood in their 
own high hope until the last decisive moment. Hail 
to the vanquished ! 

Deeper, less remediable grief than was theirs who 
lost the olive crown, is the portion of the disfran- 
chised poet. And though most ills of body and 
soul now freely render themselves to the scalpel of 
the surgeon or the probe of the psychologist, not 
easily shall you approach this wounded spirit, 
stricken of the gods themselves for the sin of re- 
creancy to their high gift. 

•i* 4? 4? •!• 

Yet have I known such a poet, by a strange privi- 
lege, and without the least treason, I am permitted 
to write his fateful story here. In doing so I betray 

97 



no living confidence, for the man, though he still 
breathes the vital air, is as no longer of this earth, 
having lost that which was the true sweetness and 
motive of his being. Reluctantly enough I venture 
to look into the soul of this unfortunate. 

The god in his bosom is dead. The burning hopes 
of his ardent youth, when the night was all too short 
for its dreams of glory, have fallen back upon his 
heart in cold and bitter ashes. Alas, how the years 
have cheated him ! Always he was putting off the 
clamant voice within his breast until he should have 
gathered more knowledge of his art — should have 
become wiser, stronger, purer. Life detained him 
from his appointed task with its manifold surprises. 
"Wait!" it said; "thou dost not yet know me well 
enough to write of me. Abide still a little longer, 
and no poet will have learned so much." Then was 
he taken in the sweet coil of young passion, and his 
nights were turned to ecstasy, his days to waking 
dreams ; so that the beauty of a woman's white body 
seemed to him the only poem betwixt the heaven 
and the earth. And this happened in the first City 
of Desire. 

Long was he held by this strong toil, but at last, 
shamed by the accusation of his pure early dream, 
he broke the guilty fetter and was again free. But 
not yet to write: not yet. For he said, "Alas! I 
have done hurt to my soul and until her peace shall 
be restored I am unworthy the sacred name of poet." 

Then, after a long season of self-torment, resist- 
ing bravely the phantoms of his late evil experience 
in the first City of Desire, yet knowing himself the 

98 



weaker for every victory, he at last set himself to 
write. But not yet was it to be, for a better Love 
came and took the pen from his hand saying : "Thou 
hast learned all too dearly what is evil in love. Now 
Shalt thou learn what is good; and then indeed 
mayst thou prove thyself a poet." 

So he married this better Love, even in the way 
of men, though not, if he had wiser known, in the 
way of poets. And much joy, for a season, was his, 
and the ghosts of bad delights fell away and ceased 
to reproach or entice him. But, ere long, when he 
sought to take up the pen, he found that this better 
Love was implacably jealous of the poet in his 
breast. "Look at me !" she cried. "Am I not more 
desirable than any fiction of thy brain? Is it for 
this I am beautiful, — nay, is it for this I gave my- 
self to thee, that thou shouldst leave me for thy 
thoughts, or that even when present, thou shouldst 
not see me for the working of thy fancy?" 

And then would she weep till the poor, distracted 
poet would take her to his heart, learning how much 
easier it is to comfort a loving woman than to write 
an immortal poem. 

Thus, again, the pen was laid aside, and the poor 
poet was, perforce, content to read the poems of 
other poets to his wife — which she graciously per- 
mitted — instead of writing any of his own. And 
the neighbors called him a model husband, for a 
literary man ; all the time wondering when he would 
produce his great work. 

So the years passed, each in its flight vainly chal- 
lenging him; and children came, adding to his 

99 



L.otC. 



burden of care, and forcing him to double-lock the 
door of that secret chamber of his soul, where he 
still kept his white dream of poesy. At long inter- 
vals, however, he went in there stealthily, drawing 
the bolts with fearful precaution, lest the wife of 
his bosom should hear him ; and often he came from 
thence weeping. 

But at length the ardor of his wife's love for him 
was appeased, or it was divided between him and 
their children ; so that one day she cried to him in 
shrill reproach : "Did I not marry a poet long ago, 
and why hast thou made nothing of thy gifts? Can 
not a man be a poet and yet love his wife? Can not 
he get works of his mind as well as lawful children 
of his body?" 

To which the poor poet, whom she had so well 
trained, made no answer, only looking at her with 
lamentable eyes. 

Then she bustled about and found the pen so long 
laid aside, and put it in his hand, saying: "Come, 
thou art not so young as thou wast when I married 
and reclaimed thee from evil, but there is yet tima 
Write I" 

The poor poet was stricken with wonder and even 
doubted if he had heard aright, so that a moment he 
stood gazing at her in pitiful uncertainty. Then 
he saw that this woman to whom he had yielded 
up the glory of his youth and the hope of his genius, 
was in earnest. And he said : 

"What now shall I write, an it please thee? — mine 
own epitaph !" 



100 



To The Shade of Lamb. 




|N what bodiless region dost thou now so- 
journ, O Oarolus Agnus, with thy slim 
shy soul answering to what was erst its 
earthly integument? Art thou, — if dar- 
ing conjecture may follow thee beyond the warm 
precincts of the cheerful day, — somewhere in the 
vast stellar interspaces (for the "downright Bible 
heaven" is not for thee) — wandering forlorn with 
Her who companioned thy earth journey? Or 
(and to this chiefly doth my fancy cleave) art thou 
sheltered in some quiet nebula remote from all that 
vexed thy spirit in its inferior transit, some celes- 
tial image of thy terrestrial Islington ; sharing, as 
of yore, sweet converse with Coleridge, and Hazlitt, 
and Hunt, and Godwin, and all that rare company 
in whose variant humor thou wert wont to delect 
thy sublunary leisure? Not otherwise would the 
kind Fates ordain ; nor would She, the fond guar- 
dian of thy mortal course, be wanting to this re- 
united fellowship. She to whom thy constant heart 
pledged a most pure sacrifice. Yes, and it is sweet 
to believe that her old office, in token of her so great 
love, hath not been taken from her. For, as the 
high debate proceeds and, waxing warm at some in- 
tractability of Godwin's (who had always power to 
move thee) thou retortest in shrill, impedimental 
fashion. She lays to lip an admonitory finger; and 

101 



thou, observant of that familiar caution, dost smile 
with renewed serenity, leaving to the philosopher 
a victory not fairly his own. 

Then Coleridge seemeth to speak, and all is ad- 
miring silence. Nothing of his old eloquence hath 
Samuel Taylor lost by his translation to a higher 
sphere. Nay, he that was finite (though in thy 
quaint malice thou wouldst not always have it so) 
is now, of a truth, infinite ; composing without con- 
scious effort a thousand "Christabels," and deliv- 
ering, unpremeditated, discourse fit for the enthron- 
ed gods. The celestial equivalent for "Coleridge 
is up!" flashes in a manner not to be conveyed by 
mundane simile, through the wide-scattered ranks 
of spheres, thrilling even the high-ministrant 
Thrones and Intelligences, who must needs perform 
their elect service with an air distraught, as wishing 
to be of that lower auditory. (Alas ! there is ennui 
even in heaven. ) While the immortal Mortal pours 
forth a strain of sublime speech on themes forbid- 
den to our mention here, the shades come throng- 
ing thick and fast to listen, as the Roman poet saw 
them when Sappho and Alcseus with their golden 
lyres smote the three-headed Cerberus and the tu- 
multuous hordes of Pluto into a ravished silence. 

Utrumque sacro digna silentio 
Mirantur umbrae dicere. 

Art thou happy there, O Elia, as when thou didst 
tarry upon this green earth? Dost thou repine be- 
side the celestial Abana and Pharpar, for the "un- 
speakable rural solitudes, the sweet security of 

102 



streets?" Wouldst thou gladlier tread again the 
everlasting flints of London, a toil worn clerk, hiding 
in thy shy bosom a genius that forever invokes the 
tears and praises of men; thy days of labor sweet- 
ened by nights of tranquil study or social converse 
with the friends whom thy heart sealed for its 
own? Or wouldst thou, O Elia, be again a child at 
Christ's, glad to lay thy sick head on a pillow, with 
the image of maternal tenderness bending over thee 
that, unknown, had watched thy sleep ; or with her, 
thy life-mate (w^hom thou so playfully dost call thy 
cousin, Bridget Elia) bound to thee withal by a 
more sacred tie than that of wedded love, — wouldst 
thou revisit the green fields of pleasant Hertford- 
shire) and all the scenes made dear by so many 
years of unbroken faith and companionship? Well 
I believe it, for thou hadst never a mind for joys be- 
yond thy ken. The factitious raptures of spiritists 
were not for thee, nor wert thou ever seduced from 
the steady contemplation of thy ideal of happiness 
here below, by a disordered vision of the New Jeru- 
salem. Thou wert not indeed too fond of the Old 
Jerusalem — why should there be another! . . , 
O rare Spirit, would that I might offer thee a cup 
of kindly ale, such as so often moved thee, to the 
world's profit and rejoicing! Better, I doubt not, 
would it please thee than the o'er-besung nectar of 
thy incorporeal residence. Thou wert ever for hu- 
man comforts — "Sun, and sky, and breeze, and soli- 
tary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness 
of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, 
society and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and 

103 



fireside conversations." Thou didst ever reluct from 
the fantastical conceits of epic cookery ; thou gavest 
thy voice for all things truly gustable, and, if thou 
wouldst do honor to the gods, a leg of mutton failed 
not to grace thy lectisternium: Even from thy 
choicest pages the sapor of roast pig rises immor- 
tal! .. . 

How canst thou, whose warm heart-beats we yet 
feel, neighbor with phantoms, — thou who in life 
wert never of their fellowship? Thy genial human 
creed forbade thee to believe much in the promises 
of men, arrogating a knowledge beyond the grave. 
This earth sufficed thee — this earth that is the hap- 
pier and better for thy too brief sojourn upon it. 
Millions have lived since thou wert called away, yet 
how few that are worthy to be remembered with 
thee ! We open thy Book and the spell of thy kind- 
ly thought is upon us. Thy phrases are loved and 
familiar. We weep with thee over thy lost childish 
love, which thou didst again figure in gracious al- 
legory as the Child- Angel who goeth lame but love- 
ly ; and we know whose heart lies buried with Ada 
that sleepeth by the river Pison. Thy tenderness 
for thy Sister — the great love and tragedy of thy 
life — is writ in gold where none but angels may turn 
the page. Thou, whose earth-passage was scarce 
noticed, art now become a treasure to all feeling 
hearts. Thou wert indeed a man and a brother, with 
thy full share of human weaknesses, which thou 
didst not, in craven humility, accept as a token of 
divine reprobation; but didst rather cover them as 
with a mantle of light, in thy true and modest vir- 

104 



tues. Thou wouldst reject the title of saint with 
the fine irony that so well became thee ; yet of many 
is thy saintship approved who would agnize few 
others in the calendar. Thy soul was full of an- 
tique reverence, though it shrank from the fictile 
faiths of men. A Christmas carol was to thee 
worth all the psalmody in the world; a kind heart 
^11 the theology and word-worship. Thou couldst 
see no evil in thy fellow man which thou wouldst 
not readily forgive — save, perhaps, unkindness. 
Thy feeling toward women, expressed in the most 
gracious of thy written words, would alone keep thy 
name sweet for many a future generation. Within 
thy heart, thy virgin heart, cheated of, yet ever faith- 
ful to, its only dream — there bloomed the white 
flower of chivalry. Cockney, as they called thee, 
loyal to thy London pots and chimneys, thou wert as 
knightly as Bayard, as tender as Sidney; and the 
world may well regret thee as born out of thy due 
time. Yet herein is the proof of thy rare distinc- 
tion—that thy life, humbly derived, humbly ful- 
filled, still sheds an interior light which turns all 
into beauty ; invests the poor and unworthy circum- 
stances of thy earth-progress with the grace of ro- 
mance; and the farther thou recedest from us, draws 
us the more to thy attaching and ennobling genius. 



105 



Capfain Costigan. 




HE first hint we had of it was in this way. 
My old friend, Captain Costigan, looked 
in at the Cave of Harmony the other 
night, after seeing the Fotheringay home 
from one of her undoubted triumphs. I should 
mention that she had just come in from the prov- 
inces and had made a brilliant debut. The London 
critics still hesitated as to the true value of her act- 
ing, but in spite of their flimsy reservations, she 
went on her conquering way. 

The metropolis was now at her feet. Never did 
she seem more beautiful; never was her impassive 
self-content more strikingly manifest. Her ad- 
mirers, enviously termed the Costigan claque, called 
it a divine languor, the repose of genius and con- 
scious power. Her detractors affirmed that it was 
mere animal stupidity ; that she continued to act, as 
in the days of Mr. Thackeray, with an utter absence 
of real passion — some of them even said, with a very 
slight degree of common intelligence. Howbeit, 
the Siddons herself did not compel all suffrages, 
and as the Captain finely said, there is always a 
skulking cloud whose office it is to shut out the sun 
— ^though, perhaps, the moon would be a neater 
simile. 

On this night of my story the Fotheringay had 
played Juliet in a manner worthy of the best tradi- 

108 



tions of the stage. I myself had it on the excellent 
authority of the Captain, whose eyes moistened and 
whose tongue tripped a little as he recounted for us 
the fervid encomiums of the foyer. A whisper went 
round the company that a certain young gentleman 
of good family — a Mr. Pendennis, I think, and a 
nephew of the famous clubman — had been hard hit 
by the Fotheringay ; and it was added that the eclat 
of this night's performance would probably clinch 
the conquest. Captain Costigan hears well when he 
likes, but of this piece of gossip he was discreetly 
oblivious. 

Something in my old friend's manner betokened 
that there was more on his mind than the latest tri- 
umph of his gifted daughter, and we were soon to 
lean what it was. I may say that the late Mr. 
Thackeray, in his memoirs of Captain Costigan, has 
hinted obscurely at the alleged bibulous propensi- 
ties of that gallant gentleman and soldier. In this 
I am afraid Mr. Thackeray, with all his genius, be- 
trayed the insular prejudice of his nation. It is 
also true that in his printed recollections Mr. 
Thackeray (who wrote much on high life and plum- 
ed himself on his acquaintance with gentility) some- 
times fell into the vulgar habit of referring to the 
Captain as "Cos." The familiarity is one of which 
I was never a witness, and I doubt if Mr. Thackeray 
would have taken the liberty with his living subject 
which he has ventured upon in the memoirs afore- 
said. 

As for the Captain's drinking, no friend to his 
memory would dispute that he took his negus like 

107 



a man and a gentleman to boot. Captain Costigan 
was of an extreme sensibility (which, indeed, is 
common to his race), and his tears flowed easily 
when he was in the drink. But if this is to form an 
indictment against him, you will be making a sad 
business of history. 

The word recalls me. Captain Costigan, after 
comforting himself with a mixture steaming hot 
and fragrant, coughed with a slight emphasis that 
the company might note him, and then, laying a 
hand on his breast, said in a tone of strong feeling : 

"Gentlemen, to-night at least it shall not be said 
of me, as of Polonius in the play, 'still harping on 
his daughter.' Gratifying to my paternal pride as 
are these testimonies to the histrionic genius of her 
who is the light of my life" — here the Captain was 
overcome by a natural emotion, but gathering him- 
self together, went on bravely — "and whose tender 
feet I have guided up the steep eminence of fame, 
my bosom now swells with a weightier cause of 
joy. It is not for Jack Costigan to boast, gentle- 
men, but the patriot comes before the father. Less 
than a half hour ago I had it from my brilliant 
young friend 'Boz' — I should say Mr. Charles Dick- 
ens of the press — that the Ministry has brought in a 
bill of Home Rule for Ireland, which is acceptable 
to all factions of my countrymen at Westminster. 
Gentlemen, the imperishable glory of rendering 
long delayed justice to my country has fallen to the 
Tories, in spite of nearly two centuries of hollow 
profession by the Whigs. The destinies of the 
British Empire are secured by this act of a magna- 

108 



nimous policy. I call on you to fill your glasses 
and drink, without heel-taps, to Hibernia NovaF' 

A burst of applause followed the Captain's 
speech, and as with our gallant and lamented 
friend, it was always a word and a song, you may 
be sure it wasn't long before he gave us in his best 
voice Ned Lysaght's fervid ditty, "Our Island." 
And how the glasses rang and the lights tipped at 
us as he intoned the sentiment ! — 

For, ah ! 'tis our dear native island, 
A fertile and fine little island. 
May Orange and Green 
No longer be seen 
Bestained with the blood of our island ! 

Nor did we let him off with that. Indeed before 
the party broke up, the honest Captain had quite 
sung himself out. But I shall not soon forget how 
he trolled the "Monks of the Screw," and we made 
a chorus of it that would have gladdened the heart 
of Prior eTack Curran himself. 

•i" 4? 4: 4? 

Ah, me! was it a dream what the Captain said 
and the merry company pledged in the Cave of Har- 
mony, — a whimsical dream turning a fair hope, as 
so often before, into loss and derision? God for- 
bid ! It is something to have lived for if we shall 
see that People take its rightful place after how 
much oppression and scorn and weary misdirected 
effort! If this thing shall be, of a truth, I shall 
hail as its first sign the passing of that species of 

1Q9 



Irishman whose few good qualities have not weigh- 
ed with the amount of shame he has brought upon 
us. He does not show himself so often in real life 
to-day; is not so busy posing and sentimentalizing 
as of yore. I hope it may not be long ere it will be 
a genuine curiosity to find him slobbering, hector- 
ing, bragging and begging in the merciless pages of 
Thackeray. 

It seems to me an added touch of mockery to the 
misfortunes of Ireland that a maudlin patriotism 
has at all times existed as a libel on the national 
character. The professional aspect which it has 
often assumed, the posturing, bad taste and rheto- 
rical extravagance which have always marked it, 
have never failed to draw the shafts of a hostile 
criticism, and to offer a fair mark for the humors of 
caricature. Both have overdone their work, but it 
can not be denied that there has been a basis of 
truth for it. No Englishman ever understood the 
Irish character better than the creator of Costigan 
— who, by the way, is not offensive on the score of 
patriotism. Few writers have dealt with us more 
unsparingly, though he was too great not to mingle 
a certain saving kindness with his sharpest satire. 
He might have been more kind and more just. The 
mind which conceived Colonel Newcome, the "best 
gentleman in fiction," was easily capable of it. 
Major O'Dowd will hardly serve us instead, though 
as little pains as Thackeray took with him, he is 
worth most of the Irishmen in fiction. 

Since the Celtic Renaissance began, with its deep 
spiritual and patriotic motive — the critics, so long 

110 



hostile or merely contemptuous, have taken to con- 
sidering us more seriously. More true light, more 
education will do the rest. The pitiable subjection 
in which this people has so long been held,— of its 
own loving, ignorant choice, it must be said, — by a 
power which has too often mingled politics with re- 
ligion, is fast giving way. Nay, in a vital sense it 
is already dissolved. Neither this power, strong 
in the grace of age-long reverence and fidelity, nor 
any other on the earth, will ever again dare dictate 
a backward step to a people pressing forward to 
the goal of liberty. History will not repeat itself 
in this regard for the Irish people. 
« * * * 
So, whether you call it a dream or not, I'll believe 
it_yes, as though Tim Healy, M. P., instead of Cos- 
tigan, had told me. The refrain of Ned Lysaght's 
ditty is still with me— would that he might hear it, 
set to the new tune of hope and promise! And so 
to conclude. Sir— asking a fair pardon for the few 
political observations above injected— I pledge you 
Captain Costigan's toast, 

Hibernia Nova! 

With this addition, 

Esto perpetual 



111 



^yi Chrisfmas Sermon. 




HRISTMAS makes us all of one religion. 
It gives us the Christ in whom all or 
nearly all of us believe — the Christ to 
whom more or less consciously we are 
in the habit of referring our good impulses; the 
Christ that stands for so many of us in the place of 
conscience. 

To be sure, this is not the Christ of the fierce old 
theology, the Christ of Calvinism and reprobation 
and all that lurid concept of religion which so long 
oppressed the world like a nightmare. Not the 
Christ of the Inquisition in whose name the san 
benito was prepared and the fires of death kindled 
for those who dared to doubt the unknowable. Not 
the Christ of Laud or Cranmer, nor the Christ of 
the Scottish Councils, whose sweet emblems were 
the stake, the boot, the thumb-screws and the rack. 
Not the Christ who cast a sword into the world, 
asserting it as his peculiar privilege to set brother 
against brother through many centuries of blood 
and strife. Not the Christ of a Redemption con- 
tioned upon the damnableness of humanity, — the 
Creator's own handiwork! — and which the human 
reason is asked to take on trust as a "mystery." 
Not the Christ of ages of delirium and hallucina- 
tion — the Christ of trances, dreams and ecstasies — 
the Christ of a whole vanished world of mummery 
and madness. 

112 



With these several Christs that have made such 
woeful history, the better part of the world is well 
done — thank God that we may now add, done for- 
ever! The pulpits know it, even though they will 
not confess the whole truth — but the pews give 
their silent testimony. Infallibility knows it and 
with unerring wisdom preaches the new Christ of 
peace, and mercy, and humanity, whom it was so 
long convenient to forget. The punitive Christ 
who sought to avenge his sufferings upon mankind, 
has given place to the Christ of love and joy. Note 
it well, for this is the greatest change which our 
time has seen or shall see. 

The old cruel theology is dead, sure enough, even 
with that ancient and venerable Church whose 
proud boast has always been that, sustained by 
Divine guidance and authority, she has never sur- 
rendered a line of her tenet or dogma. And if not 
dead formally and by express repudiation, — which 
would be too much to ask of the Infallible Church, 
— it is not the less dead in the hearts of the priests 
and the worshippers. There is no Promethean 
heat that can relume these cold ashes. . . . 

All this is due to the advance of the human spirit. 
Theology is dead, but the new Christ lives and be- 
longs to humanity rather than to the churches. In 
other words, the human spirit, which lives by and 
for the Ideal, has extracted from the legend of its 
greatest Martyr such elements as are necessary for 
its future progress. The rest it leaves in the hands 
of the priests. But, strange to say, the priests who 
so long jealously claimed the whole legend, guard- 

113 



ing it with fire and sword, and surrounding it with 
both earthly and infernal penalties, — the priests 
themselves are not half content with the old Christ, 
and, but for the pride of caste, they would surely 
renounce him. Especially as there is less and less 
profit in upholding a system of man-made theology 
which abolishes the human reason, and is justified 
only by a Scheme of Eedemption that impeaches the 
Source of all wisdom and all justice. 

Kindness is the one thing that will redeem the 
world, and it was never a conspicuous feature of the 
old theology. Let it once be seen and demonstrat- 
ed what the spirit of human kindness can do in this 
world, and we shall not be greatly concerned as to 
the awards of the next. No doubt it is for this 
very reason that the more enlightened part of the 
human race has been so long afflicted with a re- 
ligion of misery — the churches naturally would not 
discount their own promissory notes upon Heaven. 

I will not say that the religion whose cry in the 
hour of its might was "Compel them to enter in !" 
— was a curse to the world, for even in its worst 
periods it consoled, as well as persecuted, the just 
and the faithful. But I must rejoice to see the age- 
long duel near an end and the human spirit achiev- 
ing a bloodless victory at last. Not the least fruit 
of this victory will be the vindication of human na- 
ture and the restoration of its honor and dignity. 
More and more will this be seen when the degrad- 
ing idea of a Heaven to be purchased by fawning 
and wheedling and all manner of spiritual abase- 
ment, shall have passed away. 

114 



Kindness is the word for the Christmas of the 
new spirit — for the world has outgrown that 
species of Christianity which, in the words of Swift, 
made people hate instead of love one another. Not 
the selfish kindness which regards only a narrow 
circle, but the true Christian kindness which goes 
out to the poor and the stranger, and which is 
boundless as charity itself. 

Let us, every one, contribute to make of Christ- 
mas a grand festival of love and humanity; for- 
giving without hypocritical reservation those who 
have wronged or injured us, if they persist not in 
evil ; succoring the aflElicted, helping the needy, turn- 
ing away from no office or duty that can add to the 
measure of human happiness. So shall we give the 
lie to that old conception of a fallen and all but ir- 
redeemable humanity; so shall we signalize the ad- 
vent of the new Christ, with the onward and up- 
ward march of the human spirit. 




lis 



The Endless tOar, 




WAS born in chains and have been break- 
ing fetters all my life. Fetters of fear, 
fetters of superstition, fetters of heredi- 
tary hatred and prejudice, all the spirit- 
ual gyves that are prepared for most of us ere we 
are bidden into this world. A slave I came from 
my mother's womb, and I am not yet free. Not a 
link have I snapped in my struggle for liberty but 
the ghosts of the Past have risen up to reproach 
me. I being but human, am often tired of the con- 
test; they, immortal, ever renew it with a passion 
and a vigor to which weariness in unknown. Be- 
fore I was, this battle went on in the souls of those 
from whom I inherit, but they died and made no 
sign, though bequeathing the duel to me. Ah, but 
the struggle is long and the end is ever in doubt. 
What the Day gains the Night reconquers. No 
matter — the word is still to fight on! 

Often the ghosts assail me with arguments, and 
well they know how to seek out the weakness of my 
soul : "Canst thou be happier or wiser than so many 
generations of thy blood? Why dost thou strive to 
cast off the bonds which they endured patiently 
unto righteousness? In sundering these, thou dost 
break also with them and art become an apostate 
from all thy foregathered kin. Have a care! — the 
burden of thy treason shall lie heavy on thy heart." 

116 



In faith it does now, and my reason is not al- 
ways ready to make answer to this accusing Voice 
of the Chains. I should be more at ease no doubt — 
for liberty is not happiness — could I elect to silence 
the voice by giving over my reason and going 
whithersoever the ghosts would lead me. But I 
will not buy my peace at such a price — I Avill not 
be false to the rule of mind which I have chosen 
for guide in my pilgrimage. Ye shall not write 
me among the sinners against light ! . . . 

Yet I had been happier had I never thought of 
my bonds. Many I know that wear these chains 
lightly, as not wearing them at all; and others 
cover them with the flowers of duty and devotion, 
and sweet Christian humility — still the chains are 
there ! For the Past is a terrible enslaver and these 
fetters were forged in a time so remote that it need 
fear no witnesses. Yes, the Past enslaves and the 
dead oppress us more than the living. With men 
in the flesh like ourselves, we can do battle — nay, 
we can even feel a joy in the fierce grip and encoun- 
ter. But there is less satisfaction in this business 
of fighting ghosts, those warriors of the Past who 
seek to make the Present and the Future their own. 
Here we touch the power of the Unknown and the 
Unknowable with which men conjure to-day as po- 
tently as ever in the past — the ghosts ever prompt- 
ing and abetting. 

For in truth the history of the past two hundred 
years has been largely a battle with the ghosts. Not 
a few times were they routed and dispersed, but al- 
ways they reformed their shadowy battalions and 

117 



came back again to the issue. Vainly did we spend 
our best strength upon them — often we did but 
wound and exhaust ourselves, while the goblins 
mocked our useless efforts. Oh, we did not come 
off wholly without victory, nor, ghosts though they 
be, did they go quite unscathed. And though it is 
just that we reproach ourselves with having too 
often shown them an ill-judged mercy, we did 
wrest from them some cruel privileges which shall 
never be theirs again. We did strike some blows 
that were felt, hard as it is to wound them, and of 
this we were assured by the grimaces of their holy 
representatives. 

And if they now again attack us with fresh vigor 
and in numbers undiminished, we too have enlisted 
for the endless war. Still shall we rear our stand- 
ard against this tyranny of the grave, this oppres- 
sion of humanity by the chimera of the Unknown, 
this vampyre Past that sucks out the life and hope 
and joy of the Present. Still shall we do battle 
with the ghosts of man-made myth and superstition 
that so long have held the human soul in a domin- 
ion of terror. Boldly and vigilantly shall we dis- 
pute them when they seek to rob us of the safe land- 
marks of reason, that they may have power to drag 
us back unto the darkness of the Past. Nor shall 
we be the less on our guard when they come, as is 
now their wont, with flags of truce, with honeyed 
compliments, with fraternal embraces, nay, even 
with an excellent mimicry of the very speech of 
Liberty — it is the endless war ! 

Ti? V rr T 
118 



It is said that the greatest revolutions accomplish 
themselves silently. A striking illustration of this 
is seen in the abolition of the theologic Hell, which 
has taken place in our day. It has been attended by 
no religious wars, or civic bloodshed, or St. Bartho- 
lomews, or burnings at the stake, or inquisitorial 
tortures. Not even a papal Bull has been launched 
to save the monstrous chimera which was so long 
deemed a supreme article of religious faith. The 
oldest of Christian churches well knows that Hell is 
dying a natural death — knows, too, that no ancient 
mummery or conjuration will avail to keep it alive. 
As the king's touch can no longer cure the king's 
evil, so the hand of the Church has lost the power 
of reluming the bale-fires of Hell. I do not believe 
that the Church is very much concerned because, 
after a duel of many ages, it knows now that it can 
not contend against the spirit of humanity. There- 
fore, it has learned to accept defeat with a good 
grace and even to turn defeat into a kind of tri- 
umph by consenting to that which it knows to be in- 
evitable. For this is the wisdom of the serpent, 
and it is this which we now see in the attitude of 
the Church toward the general abandonment of the 
dogma of an eternal Hell. 

So the greatest of all evils raised by the human 
imagination is at last perishing under the sentence 
of men, its ancient fires blackening and smouldering 
in the light of the risen sun of humanity. But do 
not go too near, for it is not dead yet and a spiteful 
flame, the spirt of some old theologic malice, might 
leap out and destroy you ! I think indeed that it 

119 



will bear watching for a long time yet. The mon- 
ster is perhaps only scotched, not killed; and that 
Terror is still so fresh, so fresh and awful ! that we 
can not yet regard it as laid forever. Let the brav- 
est of us keep watch and ward over the monster that 
it come not back into full life again ; for Hell is so 
cunning and — think of it^ — it has lived nineteen hun- 
dred years ! . . . 

The Hell of theology was a nightmare creation of 
human fear and hate, seasoned with the perfectly 
human qualities of malignity and vindictiveness and 
malice, which we are, quite without warrant, in the 
habit of ascribing to the Devil. We know now that 
the Devil had no claw or hoof in it, and that this 
frightful Hell, which the world received during 
many ages in the name of Infinite Love, was solely 
and purely the work of men. This we now see clear- 
ly by examining the dreadful legend which still per- 
sists, though its lurid characters are fast fading out 
and its dominion over the souls of men broken for- 
ever. 

Yes, Hell is gone forever ! The power of Darkness 
is dissolved. The sun of Love is fully arisen. The 
stone is rolled back from the sepulchre in which the 
human spirit has been shut up during weary cen- 
turies. The most terrible of all despotisms is shat- 
tered in the dust. The greatest of all deliverances 
is achieved. Hell is dead ! Proclaim jubilee to all 
the world ! Shall we not sing and laugh and dance 
over the death of the great enemy of our race? 
Has it not filled the world long enough with tears 
and terror, and shall we not make merry over the 

130 



hideous monster's death, as our best tribute to the 
many generations that wept and mourned in the 
shadow of Hell? 

It is a fact that the human race has only just es- 
caped from Hell ! The liberation has been wrought 
in our day, yet so silently that the world has hardly 
perceived it. But the future historian will write: 
"Humanity descended into Hell in the First century 
and ascended into Heaven in the Twentieth." Nine- 
teen hundred years in Hell! — was it not long 
enough, oh God of mercy and justice? . . . 

This, then, is the true spiritual emancipation of 
the human race, and happy are we who have been 
privileged to see it. Think of the countless martyrs 
who died by fire and axe, who perished in loathsome 
dungeons or broke their hearts in exile, for only 
daring to dream of this glad Era of Liberty which 
now is ours! Alas! in their suffering and misery, 
their torture and abandonment, their utter cutting 
off from all human succor and their consignment to 
the reprobation of the damned, — ^how they must 
have thirsted for a sight of the Ideal City, the true 
Kingdom of God, where we, more fortunate pil- 
grims, have at length arrived ! Sainted martyrs of 
humanity, yours was the sad and bitter sowing; 
ours is the happy harvest. Blest be your honored 
names, encircled with fire and pain — and thrice 
blest the nameless ones who died, unknown and un- 
marked, in the same holy cause! Not in vain did 
you steel your souls to meet the fire, the torture, the 
supreme bitterness of death. Kejoice from the 
Heaven of the just whence you lean to acclaim a vic- 

121 



tory that is all your own ; the light that you foresaw 
is at last risen upon the world, the spirit of Hate is 
dethroned among men, the Gates of Hell shall no 
longer prevail against mankind! 



123 



Clatide Tiltier. 




I UMANIT Y has its roll of saints as well as 
the One True Church, but seldom does 
a name appear on both rosters of the 
canonized. The Devil's Advocate has 
his chance to plead against the one as against the 
other. To make the parallel complete, the faithful 
of the One True Church pray to their saints; the be- 
lievers in the larger creed of humanity invoke those 
shining names upon the course of liberty and pro- 
gress. 

It is of one among the humblest and least knoAvn 
of the saints of humanity that I am about to write. 
No better proof of the high worth of such a soul 
could be required than this impulse, strong upon 
me, to pay some tribute, not altogether unworthy 
I may hope, to the virtues summoned in the name 
and fame of Claude Tillier. Both name and fame 
are little known to us, while we are deafened and 
overwhelmed with the petty trumpeting, the vul- 
gar insistence of the mediocre. In the clamor of 
these baser voices many precious messages are lost 
— nothing more precious, we may believe, than the 
gospel of such a life. 

"I fell into this world," writes Tillier, "like a 
leaf that the storm shakes from the tree and rolls 
along the highway." He was a child of the Revolu- 
tion, born in the ninth year of the Republic, 1801, 

123 



at Clemecy, a small town in the Department of 
Niev6re. But one of his few biographers bids us 
take note that his birthplace was in the center of 
ancient Gaul, near the liOire, in the true home of the 
Gallic spirit, on the boundary line between Trou- 
badour and Trouvere. Never was a man of true 
genius condemned to a more adverse fate. He, a 
son of the Revolution, poet, thinker, philosopher, 
often felt the sharp tooth of hunger; clung always 
to the ragged skirts of want; died at last in early 
manhood as poor as he had lived. Ah, but this is 
not all ! For he tells us : "I did not lose courage — 
I always hoped that out of the wings of some bird 
sweeping the skies, a quill would fall down fitted 
to my fingers, and I have not been disappointed." 

With this quill he wrote, "My Uncle Benjamin," 
his masterpiece — indeed, his one book. Happy 
among the sons of Cadmus is he who writes but one 
book and that a great one ! Long will his fame be 
preserved after the mighty tribe of the voluminous 
shall have littered the shores of oblivion. Decay, 
death and silence are written against the fecund, 
past and present. Hugo produced as much prose, 
poetry and drama as though gifted with power to 
multiply himself by fifty. Time may be when 
enough shall not remain for one. Scott slumbers a 
lethal sleep, crushed under his folios. Most of the 
Elizabethans and their imitators are dead, save 
Shakespeare, and even his best makes no more than 
one good book. The same is true of many later 
scribblers, more or less famous, who worked out 
their poor brains, and having made, as they 

124 



thought, a monument for themselves, fell asleep 
under it. 

it is a tale 

Told hy an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing. 

To this favor must the present literary tribe 
come, whose name is legion, in constant parturi- 
tion at the behest of the publishers. Good apothe- 
cary, give me an ounce of civet to sweeten my imagi- 
nation ! — and let me take into my loving hands the 
precious thin volume of Elia and this cherished 
souvenir of Tillier. . . . 

A formal criticism of "My Uncle Benjamin" I 
shall not attempt to write. The book is a message 
straight from the heart of a true man. Could more 
be said? Fine as is its literary art, fresh its sym- 
pathy of touch as the breath of the morning, keen 
its irony and brilliant its analysis of motive, — all 
these are subordinate to the deep notci of humanity 
without which art is void and dead. The begin- 
nings of a story, somewhere observes Mr. Ho wells, 
are often obscure. Doubtless this is true of the 
Frenchman's charming work. What is not ob- 
scure, however, is the vital genius of the book, the 
living force of the man behind it, stirring the heart, 
thrilling the pulse, though the brain which wrought 
the spell has been dust for fifty years. 

We know that Tillier wrote it for the feuilleton 
of a provincial newspaper, where it long lay hid- 
den before a real publisher was found. We know 
also that recognition in due measure never came to 

125 



him during his life; that it is only within a few 
years the world has taken note of him. These 
are the marks of the true Immortal. We would 
not have it otherwise now, rightly appraising the 
legacy he left us. One can say nothing that is not 
trite on this subject of neglected genius breaking 
its bonds after infinite struggle, rising above the 
vapors of ignorance and envy, and conquering from 
beyond the grave. And yet if aught should move 
the depths within us, it is this. O death, where is 
thy victory ! O true soul, intent on thy God-marked 
course, scorning all petty human accidents ! O lov- 
er of liberty, keeping thy faith without a stain 
amid a sordid world ! O gentle hero, hard was thy 
sufferance, great shall be thy guerdon. To thee 
humanity offers its love and tears. Thy name is a 
shrine, thy memory an abiding place where the just 
and true shall pause awhile to gather strength for 
the future that shall yet be won ! 

•!• "i* 4r •4' 

It would be easy to point out certain mechanical 
defects in Tillier's charming story. There is very 
little action, no plot at all, and the end is inconse- 
quential. Mr. Stevenson observes that the blow 
from Rawdon Crawley's fist, delivered upon the 
noble features of my Lord Steyne, made "Vanity 
Fair" a work of art. So it might be said that the 
enforced osculation of Dr. Benjamin Rathery upon 
the anatomy of the Marquis de Cambyse is the epi- 
cal incident of Tillier's novel. But who cares for 
plots, intrigues and "such gear" in the presence of 
manifest genius? Let us leave all that to the penny 

126 



dreadfuls of the hour. It has no place in the esti- 
mation of such a writer as Tillier. 

And yet the story, even as a story, is as excellent 
of its kind as Goldsmith's delightful tale. It is 
marked by the same unstrained simplicity, with a 
deeper philosophy, a keener insight into human na- 
ture, and perhaps a finer literary art than we may 
ascribe to the more famous Irishman. What a 
merry company is that to which Tillier introduces 
us! — Machecourt and Page and Millet-Rataut, the 
poet; Arthus and Rapin and Dr. Minxit, with his 
amazing theory of physic, and the prince of good 
drinkers, the incomparable Uncle Benjamin. If 
you have not read how that jovial giant imperson- 
ated the Wandering Jew for the simple folk of 
Moulot, you have skipped as good a thing as you 
shall find in Rabelais or Le Sage. Say also that 
you have missed the Doctor's exquisite revenge on 
the illustrious Marquis de Cambyse, and I am sorry 
for you indeed. . . . 

Tillier suffers under the reproach of having been 
a provincial. Paris never made him her own, 
though once he walked her pavements a dejected 
lad; and the Academy of the Immortals knew 
nothing of him. A drudging schoolmaster, an un- 
willing conscript in a cause which his soul abhor- 
red — the cause of the Holy Alliance; a poor pam- 
phleteer, an obscure journalist, waging war all too 
brilliant against the bigoted clergy, the stupid 
bourgeoisie of his native district, now and then 
with the instinct of genius turning to higher 
themes; — in all this, you will say, there was little 

127 



to give promise of an immortal reputation. Yet, 
oh marvelous power of truth and genius! see now 
after fifty years the name of this humble man shed- 
ding a clear light upon his native place, which all 
the world may see; adding its distinct ray even to 
the rich literary glory of his race. Many a pilgrim 
has found his way to the sunken grave at Nevers 
where rests this son of nature, this apostle of lib- 
erty, whose free forehead was never shamed with a 
lie. The treasure of his thought is no longer lock- 
ed up in his own language; it is now a precious 
part of the literature of many tongues and stranger 
peoples. The seed of the humble sower has sprung 
up a hundredfold, and the harvest is now and for- 
ever! . . . 

I have called Tillier one of the saints of human- 
ity. Let me add a word to prove that the charac- 
terization is neither forced nor unworthy. A Ger- 
man translator says of him truly that "unselfish- 
ness was his virtue and human dignity his relig- 
ion." The human saintship of the man may easily 
be established who, in his own phrase, "always took 
the part of the weak against the strong, always 
lived beneath the tattered tents of the conquered 
and slept by their hard bivouacs." So absolutely 
true and free was this man who, again in his own 
words, "took his daily bread out of God's hand, 
without asking for more," — that we may divine at 
once the creed of such a nature. "I do not pray," 
he says, "for the reason that God knows better than 
I what He must do, nor do I adore Him because 
He does not need adoration, and the worship which 

128 



the masses offer Him is nothing but the flattery of 
selfish creatures who want to enter Paradise. But 
if I have a penny to spare, I give it to the poor." 

In drawing the lineaments of a liberal saint, it 
is likely enough that many pious people will find a 
resemblance to the Devil. Tillier's life was embit- 
tered by some polemics unworthy of his genius. He 
incurred the anathema of the Nevers clergy by scof- 
fing at the alleged thighbone of Saint Flavia, and 
the good Catholics of the place believed that his 
early death was due to the vengeance of the out- 
raged virgin. One must regret that such talents as 
his were diverted from their high and proper use 
by this petty warfare. The same remark applies 
to his long war with Monsieur Dupin, the official 
big-wig of the district. But Tillier saw no differ- 
ence between bigotry in the abstract and bigotry 
in the concrete; between the official charlatanism 
which had the nation for its stage and a reduced 
copy of the same at home. In this, also, dropping 
the question of his literary reputation, he was act- 
ing the part of a true man. 

My reading has found nothing more beautiful 
and pathetic than the closing scene in the life of 
Claude Tillier. It is drawn for us by his own hand. 
His very soul speaks to us — scarcely does the ves- 
ture of clay intervene. With death near to claim 
him, he turned once more to the world which had 
scorned him, and his genius attained a higher and 
purer eloquence than it had ever known. Never 
from the soul of man has come a message more 

129 



sweet and tender, searching the heart with a deep- 
er pathos, than this in which he shaped his fare- 
well to life: — 

"I die a few days before my schoolmates, but I 
die at that age when youth is nearing its end and 
life is but a long decay. Unimpaired I return to 
God the gifts with which he entrusted me; free, 

my thought still soars through space 

I am like the tree that is cut down and still bears 
fruit on the old trunk amidst the young shoots that 
come after. Pale, beautiful Autumn! this year 
thou hast not seen me on thy paths that are fringed 
with fading flowers. Thy mild sun, thy spicy air 
have refreshed me only through my window; but 
we depart together. With the last leaf of the pop- 
lar, with the last flower of the meadow, with the 
last song of the birds, I wish to die, — aye, with all 
that is beautiful in the space of a year. May the 
first breath of frost call me away. Happy he who 
dies young and need not grow old !" . . . 

Dear Master, Friend, Poet, our yearning love and 
regret may not heal the sorrows which were thy 
earthly portion ; but thy spirit lives on to guide us. 
It is enough : hail and farewell ! 



130 



Henrieffe 'Renctn. 




HAVE been reading, not for the first 
time, the story of her love, her sacrifice 
and devotion, in the memoir written by 
her brother Ernest Eenan. I doubt if 
there be a finer page, one in which the heart speaks 
with a truer accent, in the lists of biography. 

Great as her brother was, interest in this woman 
so modest and self-effacing, whose whole life was a 
tragedy of duty, will deepen as time goes on. But 
for her influence it is conceivable that the world 
would not have gained the ablest liberal scholar of 
modern times, and the Church would not have to 
reckon with its most deadly yet suavest antagonist. 
She was his intellectual mate — ^he admitted it, and 
he compares his distress of mind at the loss of her 
co-operation to the ^'anguish of a patient who has 
suffered amputation and who has the limb he was 
deprived of constantly within his sight." Her let- 
ters to him, written during the period of his spirit- 
ual struggle at Issy and St. Sulpice are scarcely less 
interesting than his own, and they will perhaps 
be read in some remote time when the "Life of 
Jesus" shall be neglected, if not forgotten (he him- 
self has said that af t<er the lapse of a thousand years 
only two books, the Bible and Homer, will be re- 
printed). 

131 



Yes, even on intellectual grounds, Henriette well 
deserves that her name should live with that of the 
brother to whom she gave all the treasures of her 
loving soul, whose character she helped to form and 
whose career she made possible. But it is at the 
purely human side of the relation which united 
Henriette and Ernest Kenan that I should wish to 
glance in this little paper. The world knows 
enough of his intellectual glory; it knows, too, that 
she suffered herself to be absorbed in him and his 
work, that her mind was hardly inferior to his, nay, 
that his spirit was not seldom content to rest on 
lower levels than those to which she ascended. 
Let us, then, look at them merely as brother and 
sister — it is so, we may be sure, that she would pre- 
fer to be regarded. . . . 

Renan was in the habit of attributing the Gascon 
in his nature to his mother, who, as he tells us, 
carried a gay, witty and lively disposition even into 
her vigorous old age. The charming traditions and 
anecdotes of Tr6guier in the forepart of the "Recol- 
lections of my Youth" were chiefly drawn from the 
well-stocked memory of his mother. One of the 
happiest impressions I have myself derived from 
that delightful book, is the picture of Renan listen- 
ing to his mother's chat at evening in her room at 
his Paris home. On these occasions, he tells us, a 
light was never brought in, the rays of a friendly 
street lamp serving to make a kind of twilight in the 
room, highly favorable to the legends of the old 
lady, which were always concerned with le vieux 
temps in Brittany. I am not sure that the great 

132 



man has given us anything more memorable than 
this as literature, or more worthy of that fine sym- 
pathy which was the distinctive note of his char- 
acter. 

But Henriette had inherited her father's temper- 
ament, which was of the melancholy Breton cast— 
the son seems not to preclude the painful supposi- 
tion that the poor man sought his own death, as the 
easiest escape from his troubles. "Did he forget 
himself," he asks, "in one of those long dreams of 
the Infinite, which in that Breton race often verge 
upon the eternal slumber? Did he feel that he had 
earned repose? ... We know not." 

Henriette's melancholy deepened with her years. 
In later life her brother says she had a sort of wor- 
ship of sorrow and almost welcomed every oppor- 
tunity of shedding tears. Herein she differed 
greatly from the author of the "Life of Jesus," 
whose uniform good spirits and mildly satiric 
gaiety gave nearly as much scandal as his writings 
to the strictly orthodox. 

In her youth Henriette was much admired for her 
modest beauty — her brother speaks of the peculiar 
softness of her eyes and the delicate shapeliness of 
her hands. Even before leaving Treguier, all un- 
dowered as she was, she might have married well 
once or twice but for the idea of duty which bound 
her to her family. The religious atmosphere of 
Treguier, an ancient espiscopal city, confirmed her 
natural sadness and strongly inclined her toward 
a life of retirement. At twelve years, her brother 
says, she was grave in thought and appearance, 

133 



borne down with anxiety, haunted by melancholy 
presentiments. And here is one of the tenderest 
pages of the memoir, written when the sense of her 
loss was still poignantly fresh with Renan: "I 
came into the world in February, 1823. The ad- 
vent of a little brother was a great comfort to my 
sister. She attached herself to me with all the ar- 
dor of a shy and tender nature, endued with an im- 
mense longing to love something. I remember yet 
the petty tyranies I practised on her and against 
which she never revolted. When she was going out 
in full dress to attend gatherings of girls of her 
own age, I would cling to her gown and beseech 
her to remain. Then she would turn back, take off 
her holiday attire and stay with me. One day, in 
jest, she threatened she would die if I were not a 
good child, and pretended to be dead, in fact, sitting 
in an arm-chair. The horror caused me by the 
feigned immobility of my dear sister is perhaps 
the strongest impression ever made upon me, whom 
fate did not permit to witness her last sigh. Be- 
side myself, I flew at her and bit her terribly on the 
arm. I can hear the shriek she gave even now. To 
all the reproaches showered on me I could make 
only one answer, 'But why were you dead? Are 
you going to die again?' " 

Henriette was seventeen when the father's death 
threw upon her a large share of the burden of sup- 
porting the little family. She had thought much 
of entering the conventual life and she was especial- 
ly drawn to a convent in a near-by town (Lannion) 
which was part hospital and part seminary. To 

134 



Lannion the family removed after the catastrophe 
which had plunged them into poverty, but Hen- 
riette at once gave up her dream of a religious vo- 
cation. She looked upon herself as being responsi- 
ble for her brother's future, and she set herself not 
only to aid in supporting the family but also to 
clear off the heavy debts which her father had left 
them. 

The family returned to Treguier and Henriette 
took up the work of a professional teacher. Alain, 
the elder brother, had gone to try his fortune in 
Paris. Henriette failed after a trial of much bit- 
terness, and no resort was left her but to follow 
Alain into exile. She obtained a position in Paris 
as under-mistress in a small school for girls. Her 
brother records that the beginning of her Paris life 
was terrible. "That cold and arid world, so full of 
imposition and imposture, that populous desert 
where she counted not one single friend, drove her 
desperate." The homesickness which causes the 
Breton conscript to die without any apparent mal- 
ady, assailed her cruelly, but her resolution stood 
firm. After a time of many hardships and great 
labor she secured a better place. Her brother ob- 
serves that during this period she attained a "pro- 
digious mental development," working sixteen 
hours a day and successfully passing all the pre- 
scribed public examinations. She became especial- 
ly strong in history, and at the same time her re- 
ligious ideas underwent a change. Like her 
brother, afterward, she rejected the supernatural, 
but as he himself records, "the fundamental relig- 

135 



ious sentiment which was hers by nature, as well as 
by reason of her early education, was too deep to be 
shaken." 

•ir "t "t "h 

I pass quickly over those five years in Paris, the 
most important result of which was her procuring 
for Ernest a scholarship in the Catholic seminary of 
St. Nicholas du Chardonnet and thus opening for 
him a career which has received as much of the 
"fierce white light" that beats upon an intellectual 
throne as any in modern times. Renan's account 
of the matter is as follows : 

"Educated at Treguier by some worthy priests 
who managed a sort of seminary there, I had early 
given signs of an inclination toward the ecclesiasti- 
cal state of life. The prizes I won at. school de- 
lighted my sister who mentioned them to a kind- 
hearted and distinguished man, physician to the 
school in which she taught and a very zealous Cath- 
olic, Dr. Descuret. He reported the chance of get- 
ting a good pupil to Monseigneur Dupanloup, then 
the brilliantly successful manager of the small sem- 
inary of St. Nicholas du Chardonnet, and came 
back to my sister with the news that he had the of- 
fer of a scholarship for me. I was then fifteen and 
a half years old." Renan admits that even thus 
early his sister was inclined to view the decided 
clerical bent of his education with some regret. 
Her own religious convictions were tottering, but, 
he says, she knew the respect due to a child's faith 
and never at this time sought to dissuade him from 
the path which he was following, "of his freest vo- 

136 



lition." And he records with a touch for which 
we may be grateful, "she came to see me every week, 
still wearing the plain green woollen shawl which 
had sheltered her proud poverty far away in Brit- 
tany." 

Thus Henriette gave him to the Church, as it was 
Henriette who later influenced him to renounce the 
priestly calling. 

After five years in Paris, her meagre salary being 
all inadequate to the demands upon it, Henriette 
decided upon a further sacrifice. To pay off her 
father's debts and to secure the little homestead at 
Tr^guier, she accepted a more distant and far less 
hopeful exile than that to which she had now in 
some degree grown accustomed. Leaving France, 
which she was not again to see for ten long years — 
this was in the winter of 1841 — she crossed the 
greater part of Europe and entered the service of a 
noble family in Poland, as governess and private 
teacher. 

In 1845 Ernest Renan declined the vows that 
would have made him a priest forever according to 
the order of Melchisedec and left the Seminary of 
St. Sulpice. He was not then a priest, as many 
have wrongly supposed, though he had assumed the 
tonsure and taken minor orders. It is also import- 
ant to note that he renounced the Church and the 
Christian faith on purely scientific grounds. Re- 
nan never dreamt of taking up any other form of 
Christianity, still less of Joining those inconsistent 
sectaries who call themselves Liberal or Neo-Cath- 
olics and whose delusion seems proof against the 

137 



most constant discouragement and even an occas- 
ional excommunication. His Catholicism, as he 
said, was the Catholicism of the Fathers, of the rev- 
ered dogmatists of the Church, from whose canon 
and interpretation there is henceforth no appeal. 
Being unable to accept it, he separated himself from 
it — there was no middle course for him. Casuisti- 
cally regarded, this ought to give Renan, in the 
Catholic view, a preferred position among agnos- 
tics; yet no man, not even Voltaire, has been more 
bitterly assailed by the rancor ecclesiastical. And 
of all kinds of human malevolence, it has long since 
been agreed that this is the very worst. 

•l" rl? 4? 4? 

The story of Kenan's doubts and his final deter- 
mination by which Tr^guier may have lost a bishop 
who would have revived her ancient traditions, is 
powerfully told in the "Recollections." There in- 
deed it has its meditated literary form, but I prefer 
the simpler, artless version in the "Letters," which 
were not published until after the death of Ernest 
Renan. I prefer it also because these "Letters" lay 
bare the very soul of Henriette and exhibit such an 
example of devotion to truth and duty as is rarely 
given to the world. The crowning obligation which 
Ernest Renan owed to the love and devotion of his 
sister is best told in his own words : 

"My sister advanced me a sum of twelve hundred 
francs to enable me to wait and to supplement 
whatever insufficiency of income such a position 
(that of usher or under-teacher) might at first pre- 
sent That sum was the corner-stone of my whole 

138 



life. I never exhausted it, but it secured me the 
calm of mind so indispensable if I was to think in 
peace, and saved me from being overwhelmed by 
taskwork which would have broken me down." 

Brave Henriette! Her reward was to come in 
the six years of perfect happiness and peace during 
which she and her brother lived together in Paris 
after her return from Poland. Her greatest trial, 
too, belongs to the close of this period, when Ernest 
married and his heart was shared by another. Let 
no one think to censure Henriette because it cost 
her a terrible struggle to divide her brother's love. 
There is no great love that is not selfish and ex- 
clusive by its very nature, and that of Henriette 
v/as no exception. God knows her long years of 
bitter exile, her youth wasted in labor and self- 
sacrifice, her prayers, and tears, and devotion, gave 
her the first title in this brother's affections. So 
he recognized and so he told her at last, after a sea- 
son of misunderstanding that sorely tried both 
their hearts ; offering to relinquish in her favor this 
other love. Ah, but this was to challenge the no- 
bility of her nature — she whose life had been all 
sacrifice would accept none at his hands. So the 
marriage took place and the tact and graciousness 
of the young wife* soon brought about a perfect 
union and reconciliation of all three. It was Hen- 
riette's savings that set the young housekeeping on 
foot — without her, Renan confesses, he could never 
have coped with his new responsibilities. The 
birth of one child and the untimely death of an- 

Renan married Cornelia Scheffer, niece of the famous painter Ary Scheffer. 

139 



other still closer drew these loving hearts. After 
her own death he wrote : 

"Oh, my God, have I done all that in me lay to 
ensure her happiness? With what bitterness do I 
now reproach myself for my habit of reserve toward 
her, for not having told her oftener how dear I held 
her, for having yielded too easily to my love of si- 
lent meditation, for not having made the most of 
every hour in which she was spared to me! But I 
take that rare soul to witness that she was always 
first in my heart of hearts, that she ruled my whole 
moral life as none other ever ruled it, that she was 
the constant beginning and end of all my existence 
in sorrow and in joy." 

Let us hope that the dead are not denied the con- 
solation of hearing such avowals! 

•h 't "t "i" 

Henriette Renan died in Syria in the year 1860. 
With Madame Renan she had accompanied her 
brother on a scientific mission to the country known 
in ancient times as Phcenicia. This honorable 
function had been intrusted to Renan by the Em- 
peror Napoleon III, and it had the most important 
results upon his career. Readers of the "Life of 
Jesus" will remember the beautiful dedication — 
perhaps the most beautiful ever penned — "to the 
pure soul of my sister Henriette." For it was amid 
the scenes consecrated by the Gospel that he wrote 
the greater part of his most celebrated work. In 
this congenial task brother and sister passed a short 
period of great happiness. The village of Ghazir 
high above the sea at the far end of the bay of Kes- 

140 



rouan, is specially identified with this sojourn. 
Renan describes it as one of the loveliest spots in the 
world. It is surrounded by exquisite green valleys 
and the mountains are more beautiful, he says, than 
anything he had seen in the Lebanon. 

Henriette shared to the full his labor and his en- 
thusiasm in writing the "Life of Jesus." All day 
they worked together in silence and at night they 
planned the morrow's task. "I shall love this 
book," she said, "because we have done it together, 
first of all, and then because I like it in itself." She 
had never been so happy and her communion with 
her brother had never been so intimate. Often she 
remarked that those days at Ghazir were passing by 
as in a Paradise. Alas ! it is in such ideal moments 
that Fate prepares her worst Poor Henriette's 
pride and pleasure were short-lived. In the midst 
of their preoccupation sister and brother were at- 
tacked by the terrible fever which is endemic along 
the Syrian coast. They were now at the village of 
Amschit, which they had previously made their 
headquarters while in the Byblos region. Sister 
and brother were alone together in this last solemn 
scene, Madame Renan having been recalled to 
Europe a short time before. Henriette's weakened 
constitution speedily yielded to the dread malady; 
she passed away while her brother lay unconscious 
in the next room. "We may have bidden each other 
farewell," he says, "for all I know. She may have 
spoken some precious parting word which the ter- 
rible hand of fate has wiped from the tablet of my 
brain." His own state was so desperate that the 

141 



doctor would suffer no delay, but ordered that he be 
carried away at once in a litter which had been in- 
tended for Henriette, and placed on board a French 
ship that lay in waiting. The physician remained 
behind to superintend her funeral. The simple vil- 
lagers of Amschit, who had learned to love her, fol- 
lowed her to the grave. She was laid to rest in the 
tomb of a kindly Maronite. There she still repos- 
es. "I shrink from the idea of taking her from the 
beautiful mountains where she had been so happy," 
wrote her brother; "from the midst of the worthy 
folk she loved, to lay her in one of those dreary 
modern cemeteries she held in such deep horror. 
Some day, of course, she must come back to me, but 
who can tell what corner of the world shall hold 
my grave? Let her wait for me then under the 
palms of Amschit, in the land of the antique mys- 
teries, by sacred Byblos !" 

Such is, too hastily sketched, the portrait of one 
of the most beautiful souls that ever came from 
God. Not less valuable was her life than her bro- 
ther's, in its lofty courage and devotion to duty, — 
of a higher value, indeed, as he himself confessed, 
in its idealistic attachment to pure virtue. 

Hers was no cloistered sanctity refining upon it- 
self and practising a supreme egoism in the name of 
religion. Her truth was tried by every test of sac- 
rifice, by the crucible of a bitter experience with the 
world, by an utter renunciation of self. She loved 
much, truly, and through the wondrous power of a 
great love her life attained harmony and complete- 
ness. . . . 

Saint Henriette! 

142 




I HE clever gentleman who has been called 
the "merry" Andrew Lang, but who is 
not so merry now as formerly — age and 
the near rushing of the river having 
somewhat undulcified that joyous spirit— has re- 
cently dashed off a survey and judgment of the lit- 
erature of the Nineteenth age. Readable, and pro- 
vocative, and entertaining, surely it is, for the hand 
that wrote the "Letters to Dead Authors" has not 
lost its cunning, nor the charming literary style its 
wonted allurement. But the latest awards and 
strictures of Mr. Lang are not less to be challenged 
than those of yore-— nay, they are the more to be 
combated, since age has brought to the charmer an 
unpleasing dogmatism. Mr. Lang did not, could 
not, persuade all of us when his humor was of its 
mellowest and the glamour of youth, that most 
potent aid to heresy, wrought in his favor its own 
illusion : shall he fare better now when the Jester, 
in spite of himself, takes on something of the bitter 
note of Ecclesiastes? . . . 

In his latest disparagement of the greatest Eng- 
lish poet of the last century, Mr. Lang is only hark- 
ing back to his "old lunes." The modern school of 
English literary criticism has found in Byron its 
greatest stumbling block. Since the passing of 
Matthew Arnold, there has been perhaps no oracu- 

143 



lar voice in English literary criticism ; but the voice 
of Andrew Lang, if not oracular, has at least been 
raised with persistency. 

Now Matthew Arnold, exclusive as he was in his 
literary partialities, dealt more fairly with Byron 
than Mr. Lang. For, though Arnold's exigent cul- 
ture and sense of form were revolted by the noble 
lord's crying sins against pure artistry, yet he ap- 
preciated justly the importance of Byron as a force 
in literature, crediting him (after Swinburne) with 
the "imperishable excellence of sincerity and 
strength"; and, with much enlightening criticism, 
he did not attempt to degrade the author of "Childe 
Harold" from his lofty rank. Indeed, Matthew Ar- 
nold reckoned Byron, as a literary power, next in 
order to Shakespeare and Milton — the established 
European verdict has long awarded him the second 
place. 

Mr. Lang is not better founded in his classics or 
his prosody than was Matthew Arnold, but he is 
ambitious, at least, of seeming to have more courage 
than the latter, for he actually proposes to unhorse 
the "Ohilde" at this late day. So have we read that 
once 

A falcon towering in her pride o' place 
Was hy a mousing mol hawked at and killed. 

Yet the bold Andrew's courage is, after all, of a 
strongly marked Scotch variety — he will get some 
other reckless body to lead the way and take the 
first burden of cursing. And thus he does it : 

" *Byron,' says Mr. Saintsbury, (sic) 'seems to me 
a poet distinctly of the second class, and not even 

144 



of the best kind of second, inasmuch as his great- 
ness is derived chiefly from a sort of parody, a sort 
of imitation of the qualities of the first. His verse 
is to the greatest poetry what melodrama is to 
tragedy, what plaster is to marble, what pinchbeck 
is to gold.' " 

Prof. Saintsbury is a respectable and laborious 
plodder who has written many volumes of criticism 
upon literature which might have been suffered to 
speak for itself — nay, which, in spite of Prof. 
Saintsbury, will continue to speak for itself. One 
of his critical achievements was to brand Dickens 
with the charge of vulgarity for daring to write a 
true history of England. Mr. Lang holds identical 
views as to Dickens. Arcades amho! 

Having thus pushed another before him into the 
breach, the canny Andrew finds heart to say : 

'Such, however unpopular they may be, are my 
own candid sentiments, for though from childhood 
I could, and did, read all our great poets with 
pleasure, it was not with the kind of pleasure which 
Byron in his satire and his declamation could oc- 
casionally give me." 

Is not this a luminous confession? And how art- 
ful is the suggestion that from childhood the pre- 
ternatural Andrew discriminated justly touching 
the poet about whom the rest of the world had gone 
wrong ! 

There can be no greater curse, in an artistic 
sense, than to be one part poet and three parts critic 
— the equation of Andrew Lang. How differently 
a real poet would have felt, is made clear to us by 

145 



the confession of Alfred Tennyson — a dreaming boy 
of fifteen, wlien the news came of Byron's death : 

"I thought that everything was over and finished 
for everyone — that nothing else mattered! I re^ 
member I walked out alone and carved 'Byron is 
dead!' into the sandstone." 

rb rt* rt rfr 

We shall agree with Mr. Lang that Byron is 
(often) monotonous, that he is rhetorical, that his 
versification is (sometimes) incredibly bad, and 
that he is (sometimes) "more obscure, mainly by 
dint of hurry, bad printing and bad grammar, than 
Mr. Browning." All of which is true — as true as 
that Shakespeare is often prolix, tiresome, obscure; 
that his clowns are not infrequently the most in- 
sufferable nuisances ever put upon the stage, rais- 
ing a hyperbolic idea of the stupidity of the Eliza- 
bethan audiences; that scores of pages preserved 
from oblivion by his better work, are not of the 
slightest literary value. 

But the blemishes upon Shakespeare do not blind 
us to his essential greatness (though they were too 
much for Voltaire), nor should the blemishes upon 
Byron have a like unhappy effect. Mr. Lang "can 
not understand the furore which was so much the 
child of his title, his beauty, his recklessness and his 
studiously cultivated air of mystery." To one who 
was able to disparage Byron in short clothes, the 
"furore" will, of course, present some difficulty ; but 
for us who, far removed from the spell of that splen- 
did personality, still give thanks for the genius that 
aided so powerfully in the spread of the new and 

146 



liberal gospel of humanity which ushered in the 
Nineteenth age— for us the fact is intelligible 
enough, but of infinitely less significance than By- 
ron's share in striking the keynote of the new time. 
Byron's identification of himself with the world- 
spirit, so dreadfully in travail at the dawn of the 
last century, even more than his poetical achieve- 
ment, determines his greatness. For men are more 
than metres and the prophet is greater than the 
poet. But even with regard to his poetical achieve- 
ment, I do not believe that the Langs and Saints- 
burys will ever be able to take a stone from that 
high column. There has been, for some time past, 
greater artifice in carving heads upon cherry stones, 
and a surprising degree of metrical skill, which 
none has better exemplified than Mr. Lang himself, 
in his fortunate poetical conceits. In the natural 
order, the granite cutters are followed by the lapi- 
daries and polishers; for there is much display of 
pretty gewgaws on the lower levels of Parnassus. 
But what poet since that evil day at Missolonghi,— 

Sad Missolonghi, sorrowing yet 

O'er him, the noblest star of fame 
That e'er in life's young glory set, — 

has given the world such verse as the stanzas on 
Waterloo, the Storm in the Alps, the awakening of 
Ohillon's prisoner, the Bridge of Sighs, with Ven- 
ice, "throned on her hundred isles," the Gladiator, 
"butchered to make a Roman holiday," the mar- 
moreal apostrophe to the ocean, the "Isles of 
Greece" — nay, even the Wreck in "Don Juan." Shall 

147 



we rob poetry of its garland and memory of its 
richest treasures at the bidding of Andrew Lang? — 

Did not Byron write in his "Vision of Judgment" 
the best satirical-burlesque poem in the language 
— so incomparably the best, in truth, that no Eng- 
lish poet of mark has since ventured to enter that 
field? And what poem of the Nineteenth century 
has more value as a human document than "Don 
Juan?" What literary work, verse or prose, has 
done so much to clear the air of the social cant and 
hypocrisy which it has been the century's chief 
mission to get rid of, but of which a vast deal yet re^ 
mains in the world? I take up my Taine — an ex- 
cellent critic, Mr. Lang! — and I read: 

"England was at the height of war with France 
and thought it was fighting for morals and liberty. 
In English eyes, at this time, church and consti- 
tution were holy things — beware how you touch 
them, if you would not become a public enemy ! In 
this fit of national passion and Protestant severity, 
whosoever publicly avowed liberal ideas and man- 
ners seemed an incendiary and stirred up against 
himself the instincts of prosperity, the doctrines 
of moralists, the interests of politicians and the 
prejudices of the people. Byron chose this mo- 
ment to praise Voltaire and Rousseau, to admire 
Napoleon, to avow himself a skeptic, to plead for 
nature and pleasure against cant and rule, to say 
that high English society, debauched and hypocriti- 
cal, made phrases and killed men, to preserve their 
sinecures and rotten boroughs. As though politi- 
cal hatroi were not enough, he contracted, in ad- 

148 



dition, literary animosities; attacked the whole 
body of critics; ran down tJie poets of the new 
school, declaring that the most celebrated of them 
were Claudians, men of the later empire." 

Finally he stood at bay, with the whole British 
pack, forty-power parsons, politicians and poet- 
asters in full cry after him. 

Dogs or men! — for I flatter you in saying 
That ye are dogs — your betters far — ye may 
Read or read not what I am note essaying 
To show you what ye are in every way. 

And thus he came to write his masterpiece, "Don 
Juan," an unequal work, artistically considered, yet 
the poet's most notable contribution to the gospel of 
human liberation. With all its faults, it stands 
unique in literature and only a genius of the first 
order could have produced it. "Never was seen in 
such a clear glass," says Taine, "the tumult of a 
great genius, the inner life of a genuine poet, al- 
ways impassioned, inexhaustibly fertile and cre- 
ative, in whom suddenly, successively, bloomed all 
human emotions and ideas — sad, lofty, low, bust-- 
ling one another, mutually impeded, like swarms 
of insects, that go on humming and feeding on 
flowers in the mud. He has so much wit, so sud- 
den, so biting, such a prodigality of knowledge, 
ideas, images, picked up from the four corners of 
the horizon, that we are captivated, transported be- 
yond limits." 

Mr. Lang would have us believe that the verse- 
lets of John Keats are of vastly more importance; 

149 



and so he gives us the old patter about Byron's 
fame owing much to his rank, and good looks, and 
personal histrionics. Some eclat certainly came 
from these circumstances being conjoined to the 
possession of great genius; and that is all. At 
this late day, it is astonishing that a critic of Mr. 
Lang's pretensions should raise the puerile ques- 
tion. The truth is, that the iconoclasts who aim 
their feeble missiles against Byron are in the in- 
sane condition of those who attempt a work de- 
spaired of alike by gods and reasonable men. . . . 

I shall not insult Mr. Lang, literary encyclopae- 
dia that he is, by asking him, ever so mildly, how it 
was that Lord Thurlow's rank failed to save him 
from utter damnation as a poetaster; nor shall I 
inquire where are the volumes of the Earl of Car- 
lisle upon whom (though a relative) Byron fleshed 
his maiden satire. Mr. Lang well knows that not 
a. single literary pretender, lacking Horace's "kind- 
ly vein of genius," was ever snatched from oblivion 
by a fortune or a title. The names of a few such 
are indeed recalled with the sort of odium attaching 
to the person who made an indecorous noise in the 
Eoman Senate. 

The eminent critic quoted above — who, although 
a Frenchman, has written the only readable history 
of English literature — has thus keenly and surely 
touched the spring of British prejudice against 
Lord Byron : 

"He is so great and so English that from him 
alone we shall learn more truths of his country and 
of his age than from all the rest together. His 

150 



ideas were banned during his life; it has been at- 
tempted to depreciate his genius since his death. 
To this day English critics are unjust to him. He 
fought all his life against the society from which 
he came; and, during his life, as after his death, he 
suffered the pain of the resentment which he pro- 
voked and the repugnance to which he gave rise." 

* 4? * 4? 

On the eve of his last fateful journey to Greece, 
Byron said that he had taken poetry for lack of 
better; that it was not his fit work, and that if he 
lived ten years more, the world should see some- 
thing else from him than verses. 

"What is a poet? What is he worth? What 
does he do ? He is a babbler !" 

And weary of his dreams, weary of the world's 
applause, sick of his unchallenged but impotent 
glory, he sought a change in heroical action and 
died, though with sword scarcely unsheathed, for 
Greece and freedom. 

The great poet deceived himself. He had done 
his fit work in expressing the revolt of the spirit of 
his age against the prescriptions of caste and creed; 
in voicing its aspirations for the ideal of a just 
democracy. This also is the better part of his 
poetic fame. Well might he have said in the lang- 
uage of another great poet, his own spiritual heir 
and disciple: 

"I do not know if I shall have merited the plac- 
ing of a laurel wreath upon my bier. I have never 

151 



laid much store in the glory of poetical fame, and 
whether my song be praised or blamed, it matters 
little to me. But lay a sword on my coffin-lid, for 
I have been a steadfast soldier in the war of the lib- 
eration of humanity !" 

To Byron, as to Heine, humanity accords both the 
laurel and the sword. 




153 



The J^ erne sis of Carlyle. 




HERE was a man great of intellect, world- 
famous, who during nearly half a cen- 
tury poured forth a gospel that was 
largely leavened with hatred and scorn 
of human kind. Sprung from the lowest ranks of 
the people, nurtured on poverty's most congenial 
soil, this man never ceased to advocate with stormy 
eloquence the Rule of the Strong. Rarely, if ever, 
were his sympathies with the weak and disinherit- 
ed of the earth, — the class from which he fetched 
his being. Power and the symbols of power 
(though he might sometimes affect to gibe at 
these) were the materials of his worship and the 
incentives of his genius. Waging bitter war 
against what he called shams, he yet upheld with all 
the force of his mind the colossal Shams of Power, 
of Property and Rank, by which humanity has been 
held in subjection since the dawn of history. The 
topmost effort of his talent was and remains a mis- 
reading and a travesty of the most salutary event in 
human history — the French Revolution. His chos- 
en heroes for the most part incarnated the ideal of 
power which he worshipped. Yet he was not con- 
sistent even in the chief article of his creed, for 
though hating and despising the people, he some- 
times canted of democracy, and though reverencing 
the hem of Csesar's robe, he sometimes indemnified 
his haughty spirit by a fling at the Superior Classes. 

153 



As an individual this man yielded complete re- 
spect to no human being and he never met one whom 
he would acknowledge to be his equal. His refer- 
ences to his literary contemporaries, even those 
who had furthered his interests and benefited him, 
are always couched in a tone of disparagement — 
never was there an intellectual sovereign who bore 
so ill a brother near the throne. 

At last he died, full of years and bitterness, yet a 
little softened by time and sorrow, as he would 
have us, somewhat shamefacedly, believe in his 
latest memorials. The pity of mankind was irre- 
sistibly drawn to the forlorn and loveless end of 
one who had been so long a great voice in letters, a 
prophet and a witness of the times. Then came the 
trusted friend of his last years, the custodian of his 
sacred honor, charged to report him and his cause 
aright to the unsatisfied, — ^and did the act abomina- 
ble upon his grave ! . . . 

Froude has been heartily cursed for his exposure 
of the Carlyle family skeleton, and up to the pres- 
ent his case seems to have gone a-begging for de- 
fenders. Certainly no man ever took upon himself 
a worse or more shameful function than did Froude 
— to lift, for all the world to see, the breech-clout 
of the great man who had honored him with as 
much friendship and esteem as it was in his nature 
to allow any one, and had charged him with the 
most sacred trust one man can lay upon another. 
The head and front of Fronde's offending is seen 
in these excerpts from his pamphlet, "My Rela- 
tions with Carlyle" : 

154 



"Various hints were dropped in the circle which 
gathered at the house in Cheyne Row, about the na- 
ture of the relations between them (the Carlyles), 
that their marriage was not a real marriage, and 
was only a companionship," etc. 

« * « « * 

"Geraldine Jewsbury was Mrs. Carlyle's most in- 
timate and most confidential friend. * * * She was 
admitted into Cheyne Row on the closest terms. 
Mrs. Carlyle in her own troubles spoke and wrote 
of Geraldine Jewsbury as her Consuelo. * * * 
When she (Miss Jewsbury) heard that Carlyle had 
selected me to write his biography, she came to me 
to say that she had something to tell me which I 
ought to know. I must have learnt that the state 
of things had been most unsatisfactory ; the explan- 
ation of the whole of it was that Carlyle was one 
of those persons who ought never to have married. 
Mrs. Carlyle had at first endeavored to make the 
best of the position in which she found herself. 
But his extraordinary temper was a consequence of 
his organization. As he grew older and more fa- 
mous, he had become more violent and overbearing. 
She had longed for children, and children were 
denied to her. This had been at the bottom of all 
the quarrels and all the unhappiness. * * * She 
(Miss Jewsbury) said that Mrs. Carlyle never for- 
gave the injury which she believed herself to have 
received." 

* * « H« * 

"I had observed in Mrs. Carlyle's Diary that im- 
mediately after the entry of the blue marks on her 

155 



arms, she had spent a day with Geraldine at Hamp- 
stead. I asked Miss Jewsbury if she recollected 
anything about it: She remembered it only too 
well. The marks were made by (Carlyle's) per- 
sonal violence." 



"She (Miss Jewsbury) did not live long after 
this. In her last illness, when she knew that she 
was dying, and when it is entirely inconceivable 
that she would have uttered any light or ill-con- 
sidered gossip, she repeated all this to me, with 
many curious details. I will mention one, as it 
shows that Carlyle did not know, when he married, 
what his constitution was. The morning after his 
tvedding-day he tore to pieces the flower garden at 
Comley Bank in a fit of ungovernable fury.'' 

This is awful, and perhaps at all points it has no 
parallel in literary biography. Yet I believe the 
final judgment of the world will not be so harsh 
upon Froude as it is at present. I believe his of- 
fence, bad as it must be deemed, arose from a per- 
verted casuistry rather than from a motive of con- 
scious and deliberate malice. If Froude was the 
devil in this business, let us at least give the devil 
his due. He was himself a writer of high per- 
formance, endued with more than the usual sensi- 
tiveness that belongs to the literary character. He 
was naturally solicitous about his own reputation 
— had not he, also, a name to leave to future times, 
and should he suffer an evil blot upon it? He saw 

156 



himself attacked by the greedy and unscrupulous 
Scotch relatives of Carlyle. His feelings were 
deeply injured. His honor was impeached and the 
basest motives were attributed to him. Something 
of all this was due to Carlyle's own vacillating, un- 
candid course with regard to the nature and extent 
of the responsibility which he had imposed upon 
Froude. The latter disclaims any personal ill- 
feeling toward Carlyle upon this or any other ac- 
count, but one can hardly doubt that he resented 
the clumsy checks and balances that hindered his 
task and at last brought it to ruin. It is enough, 
from Fronde's point of view, that he had done a 
great and peculiarly thankless labor in fulfilling 
his trust toward Carlyle. It had involved, first, a 
painful responsibility, than a host of anxieties, and 
last of all, it had drawn a maddening persecution 
upon his closing term of life, which, as he tells us, 
he had looked forward to as a peaceful harbor. 
Baited by all the pack, wounded, desperate and 
dying, he struck out in defence of his honor and 
good faith, and, passing into the Silence, left his 
vindication to the world. 

Whatever judgment we may form as to the means 
he employed to clear his name, it will be diflflcult to 
impeach the sincerity of Fronde's solemn witness in 
the shadow of death. I, for one, do not believe, as 
so many affect to believe, that his last act in this 
world was to erect a monumental slander to the 
memory of his friend. To hold this detestable 
view, which has been lightly assumed by the mob 
of Fronde's censors, were to think worse of human 

157 



nature than Carlyle himself did in his most lycan- 
thropie humor. . . . 

I have said that Fronde's disclosure concerning 
Carlyle can not at all points be matched by any in- 
stance known to me in literary biography. This 
statement has regard to the eminence of both men, 
the nature of the trust imposed upon Froude, and 
the entire moral history of the affair. But as to 
Carlyle's alleged sexual impotency there need, of 
course, be no vulgar wonder, since it is a common 
enough physical misfortune. Yet it is this matter, 
as declared baldly in Fronde's posthumous pam- 
phlet, which has chiefly infuriated the old maids of 
the literary press, as if it were not under Heaven 
conceivable that the author of "Sartor Resartus" 
should have lacked the power to beget a child of his 
body! Well, we have the best evidence for believ- 
ing that the author of "The Stones of Venice" la- 
bored under a similar incapacity, and the regretta- 
ble fact, though it lost him his beautiful wife (who, 
woman -like, thought less of his genius than of cer- 
tain other things), seems in no way to have impair- 
ed the virility of his style; yet I believe, as in the 
case of Carlyle, that it is answerable for the scold- 
ing element in so much of his work. Oh, you ladies 
of both sexes, have you never heard the true story 
of one who was a greater genius, a greater scold and 
a fiercer hater of humanity than even your idol, Car- 
lyle? Have you never wept over the piteous trag- 
edy of Stella, which moved the kindly cynic Thack- 
eray to his finest pathos? Was the Nemesis of 



158 



Swift the Nemesis of Carlyle? — Look at this paral- 
lel: 

Froude. — He (Carlyle) had said, in his journal, 
that there was a secret connected with him un- 
known to his closest friends ; that no one knew and 
no one would know it, and that without a knowledge 
of it no true biography of him was possible. 

Thackeray. — A remarkable story is told by Scott, 
of Delany, who interrupted Archbishop King and 
Swift in a conversation which left the prelate in 
tears, and from which Swift rushed away with 
marks of strong terror and agitation in his counte- 
nance, upon which the Archbishop said to Delany, 
"You have just met the most unhappy man on earth ; 
but on the subject of his wretchedness you must 
never ask a question." 

Swift was many years in his grave ere the legend, 
crystallized which is now held to explain the riddle 
of his relations with Stella and Vanessa, as well as 
a great part of his misanthropy. In what seems 
the similar case of Carlyle, the world has not been 
obliged to wait for the legend, thanks to the ill- 
advised attacks upon the man who knew the story 
and who was goaded into telling it. The Swift 
legend belongs to an age of greater immorality, per- 
haps, of less publicity, certainly, than our own. It 
is probable enough, though supported only by the 
vaguest hearsay. The chief witness, the injured 
party, never blabbed, so far as we know, and died 
with her secret. Stella had no Geraldine Jewsbury 
to confide in, and she submitted her will to the ter- 
rible Dean ( who could yet be so kind and loving ! ) 

159 



in all ways. Besides, and this is the core of it, she 
loved Swift with a great yet humble passion and 
with the fullest surrender of self; he was her god, 
her idol in whom she would neither see nor admit de- 
fect. Qiuarrel with him? — ^why, she could not have 
survived one angry look from his awful brow, but 
would have perished under his frown, as did her un- 
happy rival of many years. This was a very dif- 
ferent thing to the love of Jane Welsh for the great 
man to whom fate had united her and in whose trag- 
ic life-story her name will now forever bear a pain- 
ful interest. A story, says Froude, as sternly 
tragic, as profoundly pathetic, as the great Theban 
drama. . . . 

Yes, the Nemesis of Swift was the Nemesis of 
Carlyle, but the greatest satirist that has ever lash- 
ed the follies and vices of mankind, never conceived 
such a masterpiece of ironic fury as that scene at 
Comley Bank on the morning after Oarlyle's wed- 
ding-day. This is the heaviest clod of humiliation 
that Froude cast upon that grave in Ecclefechan 
church-yard. It is enough to move our pity for the 
great man, so tragically shamed by the disclosure, 
who was himself little given to pitying the weak- 
ness and misfortunes of our common humanity. 



160 



v>^ 



At Toe's Cottage. 




Y mind was possessed with the mournful 
image of the Poet, the romance and trag- 
edy of his life. This was the very air he 
breathed. Here were the scenes amid 
which he passed his last years with her, the Child- 
Wife, whose memory still mingles with his like a 
consecration. All that sad story of the rare genius 
fettered by poverty which eats out the soul, — 
chained, too, in the deadlier bonds of evil habit, — 
came upon me with the poignant force that the as- 
sociation of locality alone can give. 

It had rained intermittently all week, ending at 
last in a furious night of storm — such a night, I 
could not but think, in which his unquiet spirit 
would have rejoiced to walk abroad. The morn- 
ing rose, calm, refreshed and beautiful, with the 
added peace of the Sabbath. I was early on the 
Kingsbridge road, and — without ever having seen 
the place, or even a picture of it, without any direc- 
tion, verbal or otherwise — something led me 
straight to the humble little cottage which had been 
the home of Poe. 

Homely and poor indeed it is; but, thrilled as I 
was by the first glimpse of it, penetrated by a sud- 
den realized sense of that immortal failure, the low 
small house speaking silently of the 

161 



^'Master 
Whom unmerciful disaster followed fast and follow- 
ed faster/' 
took in my eyes the dignity and pathos of a shrine. 
How much more potent, after all, is a living mem- 
ory than a mere literary reminiscence ! Elsewhere 
one might think of Poe in the conventional manner : 
of his undoubted genius, yet unequal literary pro- 
duct; of his fickleness, his egotism, his constant 
recourse to friends in time of need and repudiation 
of them with the first ray of returning prosperity; 
of the legacy of many devils he had inherited, bring- 
ing to nought all his nobler resolves and ambitions ; 
lastly, of that fatal curse of drink and drugs which 
dogged him from defeat to defeat until it wrought 
out his untimely death. All of which is true as 
truth, — for have not many sage moralists told us 
so, and doth it not delight the whole Tribe of Dul- 
ness to be able to point the finger of scorn at the 
faults and the failures of Genius? 

But, look you, friend, here is not a place for 
harsh judgments, however condign they may be, 
upon the Man and Brother whom this humble roof 
once sheltered. Through this narrow gateway on 
which I lean, how often he passed, bearing his earth- 
burden of toil, and sorrow, and deferred hope that 
maketh the heart sick! His feet have worn these 
stones with their daily imprint. This small world 
was his to whom imagination opened realms with- 
out bound. This poor cot afforded lodgment to a 
head that could have beggared the dreams of Pros- 
pero. Here he was often happy with the wife of 

162 



his youth, who came to him a child, and still young 
and lovely, was called away. Through this very 
gateway— not changed at all— they carried her 
wasted form. One feels the hush upon the curious, 
pitying throng of bystanders, after a lapse of fifty 
years. She died of want, it is said— I am glad to 
believe that heart-hunger had nothing to do with 
it . . . 

The little house stands with its shoulder to the 
street, and is neighbored by some rather imposing 
villa residences. It has one fairly large window 
looking on a small grass-plot in front, and two tiny 
windows which light the low sleeping-room up- 
stairs^ — for there is an "upstairs," although the cot- 
tage is practically of only one story. Over the 
large window is an eflftgy of a raven, which looks as 
if it might have been dashed off by a handy boy. 
There is, besides, an inscription stating that the 
house was occupied by Edgar Allan Poe from 1845 
to 1849 ; also, that it is now the property of E. J. 
Chauvet, D. D. S., Fordham, N. Y. The said Chau- 
vet, D. D. S., lives next door in one of the imposing 
residences I have mentioned. His house is five 
times larger and cost many times more money than 
Poe's ; but people in the neighborhood say he wants 
a good deal more money than that before he will 
yield to the City of New York his title in the Poe 
cottage. 

After a brief conversation with the doctor, I de- 
cided he was not the man to furnish off-hand a lum- 
inous estimate of the Poet's genius, or even to sup- 
ply a bibliography of the Poet's works. One could 

163 



not, however, praise too highly his zealous desire 
that the city should take the cottage off his hands — 
at his own price — and I readily fell in with his view 
touching the too common neglect of genius, without 
being entirely blind to his interested application of 
it. It is a world of irony at best — is it not, my 
masters? — and in such a world Chauvet, D. D, S., 
with his fine big house and his patronage of the dead 
Poet, with his poor little house, holds a place in 
strict accord with the eternal unities. The humor 
of this observation would probably be lost upon the 
doctor — I fear it impressed me so strongly as to 
make me lose a great part of his valuable conversa- 
tion. 

Before the cottage is a blasted cherry tree, half of 
which has been cut down, leaving a blackened trunk 
upon which the penknives of relic-hunters have 
wrought additional havoc. It stands not an un- 
worthy symbol of the man whose eyes often rested 
on it in its greenness and vigor. Across the street 
a pleasant park, named after the Poet, has been 
set out. Thither it is proposed to move the historic 
cottage when a settlement shall have been made 
with the present owner. Knowing the mind of 
Ohauvet, D. D. S., I should recommend the commit- 
tee having the negotiation in charge, to come to 
terms with that gentleman as soon as practicable. 
They will not better the bargain by waiting. 

The cottage is now tenanted by an Irish lady 
named Kenealy, who has no part or lot in its tra- 
ditions, and who is obviously in doubt whether the 
public interest in her domicile is to be ascribed to 

164 



a proper motive. In the course of a very brief con- 
versation, she contrived to make me understand 
that whatever "goings on" might have taken place in 
the house when "other people" lived there, nothing 
could be urged in reproach of her tenancy! As I 
stood musing at the gate, a good-natured country- 
man of Mrs. Kenealy's joined me, and at once volun- 
teered some surprising information touching the 
house and its former celebrated tenant. Lowering 
his voice cautiously as a party of ladies drew near, 
"Do ye know, sir," he said, "that the ould boss wrote 
^The Raven' sitting at the little windy there furninst 
ye — one night afther a dhrunk!" And he added 
with true Milesian humor, "Would ye wondher at 
it?" . . . 

Going away slowly and turning more than once to 
look again — I suspect that Chauvet, D. D. S., 
thought I was trying to get a better view of his 
house — my mind dwelt upon the strange fortune of 
Poe's literary fame. The chequered history of let- 
ters affords no m9re striking contrast than the pres- 
ent literary estate of this writer, as compared with 
the sordid failure of his life. To the despised lit- 
erary hack, the job-man of newspapers and maga- 
zines, who was never able to command a decent sub- 
sistence by his pen, has fallen an aftermath of repu- 
tation such as few of his contemporaries enjoy. His 
works, translated into a more sympathetic lan- 
guage by a Frenchman of genius whose mind seems 
to have been a replica of his own, have yielded him 
a proud and enviable fame among the most appre- 
ciative and artistic people in the world. His name 

165 



abroad is illustrious and honored, while many of 
his contemporaries who outshone him at home have 
gained no foreign suffrage. 

Nor is this all. Even at home, in the land where 
an evil destiny cast him in an epoch of brutal ma- 
terialism, his fame is steadily rising. Whatever 
the awards of a factitious "Hall of Immortals," in 
the true pantheon of American letters no name is 
writ higher than his. Fortunes have been made by 
the publication of his books, edited with anxious 
scholarship, issned in sumptuous form — ^books 
which never yielded their author a living and might 
not avail to keep hunger and misery from the Be- 
loved of his heart. The humble home in which he 
dwelt has become a veritable shrine that will ere 
long be cared for by the State. Each succeeding 
year new biographies of him are put forth, new and 
ever-heightened estimates of his genius are made. 
The artist has survived the man ; the immortal suc- 
cess the temporary failure. And the world is mak- 
ing for Edgar Allan Poe — as for so many other 
children of light whose fate it was to walk in dark- 
ness — its immemorial atonement. 




166 



Literary FolK> 




URNING over a catalogue illustrated with 
portraits of authors, the other day, I was 
painfully struck with the ordinariness 
of the lot, in point of good looks. This 
was especially true of the women authors, and the 
sad conclusion was forced upon me that the jealous 
Muses impart the smallest possible share of their 
own immortal beauty to the earthly daughters of 
the lyre. After all, there never was or will be a 
poem equal to a really pretty woman. I have 
known literary men who would grow languid even 
upon the subject of their own works, while the per- 
ennial theme of the woman made for love never 
failed to kindle in them fresh eloquence and in- 
spiration. 

Beauty is a woman's right, and we say what we 
do not believe when we talk of the superior charms 
of the female intelligence. Along in middle life it 
doubtless occurs for the first time to many men 
that women have minds as well as bodies, but dur- 
ing the period when Nature is most exigent, the mat- 
ter gives them no concern. 

I believe no woman ever r.egretted that she was 
loved for her beautiful body rather than for her 
gifted mind. Of course, even a divinely pretty 
woman has no license to be a fool — and few are the 
men who will call her such. In fact, for women up 

167 



to the fortieth year, beauty is an excellent substi- 
tute for every kind of mental accomplishment. 

I once knew a woman who was clever enough to 
dispense with good looks, if ever a woman was. 
Yet she lamented her face constantly, — which in- 
deed might have been a better one, — and often ob- 
truded upon my notice her one claim to considera- 
tion, in a physical way — a delicate and charming 
foot. Ah, touching vanity of women! This lady 
often remarked with a conviction based upon her 
own feelings of deprivation, that George Eliot 
would have gladly bartered her literary genius for 
a good face. No doubt she would, at least before 
her grand climacteric, which she had surely passed 
before she married her third husband. Her French 
contemporary, George Sand, had a few more men as 
well as greater physical charm and a less factitious 
talent. 

No: literary genius never consoled a woman for 
an ugly face, for to love and be loved is ever^ 
woman's natural desire. George Eliot shows her 
spite in her own works and in true womanly fash- 
ion resents Step-dame Nature's unkindness to her- 
self by giving a bad end to every character whom 
she has endowed with personal beauty. She hur- 
ries Maggie TulUver and Tito Melema to their doom, 
not like a literary artist, but like an executioner. 
Be sure of this, ladies : "Romola" and "The Mill on 
the Floss" would each have had a different ending if 
the mother of Mary Ann Evans had not too serious- 
ly considered a horse's face at a certain critical 
time. . . . 

168 



The men in my catalogue can boast little advan- 
tage over the women, though their case is not so 
sad, since beauty is not expected of them. Yet a 
contemplation of this gallery of portraits does not 
induce cheerfulness. Such ravaged heads, such la- 
mentable faces ! "Picture me young and handsome 
as I once was," said Heine, "not like an emaciated 
Christ of Morales." I wish some of these authors 
would practise upon us a similar deception. 

It sometimes occurs that you form a favorable 
idea of an author's personality from his literary 
style. You go on happy in your illusion until one 
day a photograph in the Critic or the Bookman 
shocks you into a new attitude, generally of hostil- 
ity and aversion. A good many men, as well as 
most women, will not read an author if they dislike 
his personality. Think of Byron's head and face 
which stamped him as a god, and remember how the 
world, like a woman, passionately lamented him. 
Call up now the weirdly contorted Cockney phiz 
of Kipling, and wonder no more that he is the best 
hated and most liberally cursed poet of our time. 

As a rule, the tradition of personal beauty does 
not obtain in the genus poetarum. Nature dislikes 
to double her gifts. For one Byron or Goethe she 
makes many a blear-eyed Horace, many a deformed 
Scarron or grinning Voltaire. Of all the fictions of 
the poets the most flattering to themselves is that of 
the beautiful Apollo. Perhaps it was not so much 
a fiction before the incident of the fiaying of Mar- 
syas — after that the god seems to have visited his 
disfavor upon all his mortal competitors. 

169 



Not all, I would say, for now and then he makes 
an exception, and surely he has done so in the case 
of Edwin Markham. Here is a poet who looks the 
part^ — the deep eye that denotes prophetic power, 
the Jovian head, the godlike port, all bear the man- 
ifest seal of that character which was recognized as 
divine by the wise ancients until the ignoble race of 
publishers arose to degrade it. 

I believe Edwin Markham to be a true poet — the 
highest voice in American letters today. I also 
regard him as a brave man, since he dares to live his 
poetry and hy it — a feat not less difficult than to 
have written "The Man with the Hoe." Perhaps it 
is unfortunate that Mr. Markham should be so gen- 
erally hailed as the laureate of the new socialism — 
I do not find it easy to imagine Apollo tuning his 
lyre to the praises of the trade-unions. There are 
truer, finer things in his poetry than the philippics 
which he hurls at the frowning brow of Capital. 
His minor strains — tender little songs of his heart 
and home — to my mind better attest his poetical in- 
spiration. 

From this you are not to infer that I regard the 
Poet's clamant humanitarianism as a pose, or in 
any degree insincere. On the contrary, I have re- 
ceived from no other man so strong an impression 
of moral cleanliness and intellectual integrity. 
Would I had known him when he was younger — 
would I might see the poetical sins of his youth! 
This Poet was not always a priest. There must 
have been terrible storms of passion in that strong 
soul ere he came to us, chastened and exalted by the 

170 



trial of years. But Edwin Markham, with rare dis- 
cretion for a poet, will not suffer us to touch upon 
that page. 

4: 4- 4? 4* 

I have a heart full of sympathy for the Literary 
Woman — for which I well know I shall not receive 
her gratitude. She is so numerous and prolific 
(alas! chiefly of books), so brilliant and enviable, 
so panegyrized and paragraphed, in short, so emi- 
nently able to t^ke care of herself, that my concern 
for her must needs appear impertinent. 

Well, I shall go on pitying her, in spite of her re- 
sentment — pitying her for the brave fight and the 
futile effort and the success that is little worth; 
often, too, for the calm joys of maternity and do- 
mestic peace Avhich a factitious ambition has shut 
out of her woman's life. 

This latter is, I suspect, a sore point with Milady 
Literary — if she were ever to lose her angelic tem- 
per, it would be on account of this. In such a mo- 
ment, how intense her loathing of bestial, philopro- 
genitive Man, grossly seeking to divert her from 
the passionless joys of literature! Curiously it 
chances that the desire of so many women to write 
is only another form of the maternal instinct. Tra- 
vail the woman must — her woman's flesh requires 
these natural pains — but the pangs of literary con- 
ception are to many of the sex a sufficient and agree- 
able substitute. I know a literary woman who has 
had both experiences, and her now exclusive devo- 
tion to her Art (the capital is hers) tells the rest 
of the story. 

171 



Women enjoy writing for its own sake more than 
men do. 

It was my pleasant fortune to meet a lady, not 
long ago, who came to ask my poor counsel with a 
view to having her MSS. published. She is not fa- 
mous and yet not absolutely without reputation. I 
believe she has quite as much talent as the run of 
literary women. I should think her capable of 
writing a book that would make a good mediocre 
sucess — the sort of thing at which women always 
beat men. But the point I want to make about this 
person (and I think it applies generally to the scrih- 
entes sorores ) refers to her astonishing looseness of 
faculty. In this I read alike the success and the 
failure of women in literature. 

To most literary men the act of mental composi- 
tion is painful; to some great writers it has been 
superlatively so. To most writing women I believe 
it is quite the reverse — nay, unconscionably agree- 
able and easy. Hence the close analogy between a 
writing woman's talk and her literary product; 
hence also the latter facile agreeableness. Milady 
of the MSS. is here an excellent witness. To say 
nothing of her prose, which she throws off at will 
and in fearsome quantity, she exudes sonnets at 
every pore. I examined a bulky typewritten vol- 
ume of these, some five hundred in number. There 
was no denying a certain poetic faculty and a 
dreadful poetic facility. The lady rhymed well 
and scanned with accuracy. Her mind was well 
furnished with the usual stock paraphernalia of the 
versifier. Everything was there you had a right to 

172 



expect, so far as prosody goes and mere verbal me- 
chanics; but of the heaven-born surprise and thrill 
and uplift of true poetry, not a pulse, not a breath, 
not a flutter. 

And the burden of all this rhymed futility was 
love, super-passionate love, for the lady is not an 
ingenue (sic), and so, naturally revolting from the 
realism of the senses and the enforced contact of 
the conjugal relation, her passion (i. e., the passion 
of her verse) is frozen, though splendid — a cold, 
cold thing, fit for the nebulae or the interstellar 
spaces. 

The lady is fair, fat and perilously near forty. 
Her well-nourished person suggests images strong- 
ly at variance with the anaemic ardors of her verse. 

"Surely you do not mean all this?" I hazarded. 

She smirked and replied, "But why not? It is 
poetry !" 

I felt there was nothing to be said and, like 
Dante's lovers, we read no more that day. . . . 

At another time I asked Milady of the Sonnets, if 
it was not a terribly arduous task to have composed 
all this poetry. She smiled with a self-complacent 
disdain that might have abashed Melpomene her- 
self. 

"Not at all — I simply could not help it. To write 
poetry has been the one great joy of my life since — 
since — " she hesitated and did not finish the sen- 
tence. There was a moment's pause while Milady 
strove with her memories. 

Resuming with an effort, she added : "Far from 
being a painful task, it has been a pleasure and a 

173 



recreation. I have only to take up my pen, when 
it simply flows so that I can hardly write down the 
lines as fast as they come. And so perfect that I 
seldom change a word!" 

I hope I am not without feeling for the pathos of 
this confession of the fruitful, though ineffective, 
poetess. She had wasted years that might have 
been more happily and usefully employed. She 
had (as I learned afterwards) separated from her 
husband, whose chief offence was that he failed to 
do becoming honor to her literary genius. Her 
vain hope had been buoyed up at long intervals by 
a perfunctory word of praise from some literary 
character upon whom she had forced her manu- 
scripts. No publisher would bring out her work 
unless he were guaranteed against loss. This guar- 
anty she was unable to furnish, and so the years of 
deferred hope and heart-ache and cankering envy 
that will ere long leave her a blighted, disappointed, 
miserable old woman. 

Is it not sad, Mesdames? ... 




174 



DicKcfis: A ^Ret^erie, 




EAR, immortal Dickens! So the wiset 
publishers have discovered a "revival" of 
interest in the Master of English story, 
and they are paying him the compliment 
of many new editions. As if it were not his prov- 
ince to lay his strong toil of grace on each new gen- 
eration; as if he were not of those beloved Immor- 
tals who live on forever in the changeless romance 
of the young : as if, in fine, his world-wide audience 
had not been steadily growing in the space since his 
death until now it is by far the greatest that has 
ever done honor to an English writer. Truly 
messieurs the publishers shall easily persuade us. 

But I for one am glad at any rate to hear of this 
"revival," which never ceases, and to enjoy the pub- 
lishers' accounts of those fine new editions of the 
old yet ever young Dickens. Books were written 
better in his day, no doubt, though Mr. Howells, 
who was once a daring young heretic on this sub- 
ject and is now himself under the hand of time, will 
not have it so. But surely they were not made so 
well, at least for popular reading. And here the 
publisher is entitled to his bit of praise, however we 
may smile at that evidence of the ingenuity of the 
publishing trade, the Dickens revival. It will, I 
think, be always a safe venture to prepare for and 
to announce a "great revival of interest" in the 
works of Mr. Charles Dickens— especially with an 

175 



eye to the new generation. Other authors dispute 
the fickle preference of the old, the disillusioned, 
and the too mature — the young are always for Mr. 
Dickens. 

And the sceptre shall not pass from him. Over 
twenty years ago I first read my Dickens in the 
paper-covered books of the Franklin Square Li- 
brary. They were ugly in appearance, clumsy to 
hold and, worse lack of all to a young reader, there 
were no pictures to give form and pressure to the 
story. But all this disparagement is the work of 
my later thought. Surely I was not then conscious 
of any fault or blemish in the Aladdin's treasure 
that had suddenly fallen to me from the sky. Pity 
the man who is not loyal to his first loves ! I would 
give much to taste again the feelings of joy and rap- 
ture and wonder which then were mine while mak- 
ing my breathless course through those ungainly 
publications of the Franklin Square. 

I was a boy then — God help me ! — the sort of boy, 
I dare believe, the Master had much in mind ; and a 
whole world of bitter experience lies between me 
and that happy time. Shall I ever forget the bare 
cold little room where I spent so many unwearied 
hours, hugging my treasure in both arms; often 
hungry but forgetting it, fed as I then was with the 
food of romance; oftener cold, but unheeding that, 
too, warmed as I was with the glow of fancy? And 
the smell of the fresh-printed pages as I turned 
them with trembling, eager hands (the door of the 
little room shut and I alone) — have I ever since 
known the like? — could the costliest book now yield 

176 



me such a thrill? — ^alas! could any spell, however 
potent, again make me free of the vanished King- 
dom of romance? 

O poor little room, which saw that miracle, the 
lighting up of a boy's imagination, the swelling 
chivalry of his young heart, the simple joy of his 
candid youth, — I look back now with lamentable 
vision on the long way I have come, and I know I 
have met nothing so good in my journey. Would 
to God, little room, I might wake even now as from 
a vexed and sorrow-laden dream, to find myself 
that boy once again, sheltered by you and heedless 
of hunger and cold, could he but slake his thirst at 
the Enchanted Fountain ! . . . 

And sure these blessed things of memory have 
played me a trick, or I am in very truth a boy again 
— dear God, do but grant it, a boy again! For I 
would swear that just now a breeze of youth smote 
my cheek, and lo ! in a trice I am whirled back into 
the past. Lost and breathless a moment, I soon 
find myself in a garden with my pretty mother, bolt- 
ing furtive gooseberries and trying to look un- 
moved ... A wind arises and now I am in the 
house with Peggotty (I still feel the touch of her 
finger like a nutmeg grater), poring over the Crork- 
endill Book and vexing her simple soul with my 
persistent questions. Another change and look! 
— I see little Em'ly, and Ham, and Mr. Peggotty, 
and Mrs. Gummidge (bless him for that name!). 
Barkis has just brought me in the cart and I am so 
proud to be a Yarmouth Bloater (oh memory!). 
Isn't it fine to live in a house made out of an old 

177 



boat and to hear the wind come creeping about it at 
night when you are snug in bed and just dropping 
off to sleep! . . . How sweet little Em'ly is, 
and oh, how I love her with all the innocent love of 
my boyish heart I The nights I lie awake, thinking 
about her and praying that she may come to no 
harm ! . . . Mr. Murdstone is worse than ever 
since that day when he beat me and I bit him on the 
hand. His beard is very black and so thick that his 
skin looks blue after shaving — confound his whis- 
kers and his memory! . . . My box is ready, 
Mr. Barkis is here again, and my mother comes out 
to say goodbye to me, with her baby in her arms. 
She would have said something more to me, I know, 
but he was there to restrain her. "Clara, Clara, be 
firm !" I hear his warning voice. But she looked 
intently at me, holding up her baby in her arms. 
So I lost her, so I saw her many a time afterward 
at school, a silent Presence at my bedside, holding 
up her baby in her arms. . . . 

Comes a wooden-legged man stumping through 
my dream and eying me fiercely. Was his name 
Tungay, and did he put a placard on my back read- 
ing "Take Care of Him — He Bites"? — I must ask 
Traddles about this. . . 

The "horfling" and I have just parted in tears — 
she to St. Luke's Workhouse and Mr. Micawber to 
the Fleet, still gallantly figuring on his insoluble 
problem. I am somewhat comforted in the assur- 
ance that Mrs. Micawber (with the twins) will 
never desert him . . . Now I am in Canter- 
bury. It is a fine day and the rooks are flying 

178 



about the old cathedral. Here is poor Mr. Dick, 
still bothered about the head of Charles I., and the 
Doctor placidly at work on his dictionary (not hav- 
ing advanced a letter since the old days!), and 
Uriah Heep deep in Tidd's Practica ("Oh, what 
a writer Mr. Tidd is, Mr. Copperfull !" ) . . How 
familiar seems this house, with the hallowed sense 
of early dreams! I enter and lo! what graceful 
figure is this coming down the stair to meet me, a 
bunch of household keys jingling at her waist? 
What was it about Agnes Wickfleld that made me 
associate her always with the peace and radiance 
of a stained-glass window? . . . 

How the scar flamed out on Miss Dartle's pale 
cheek when Steerforth asked her to sing! . . . 
I hate that sneak Littimer who always makes me 
feel as if I was too young (alas, too young!) . . . 
Yarmouth again and Steerforth with me, more 
handsome and fascinating and irresistible than 
even. Yes, though he broke her heart, and mine, 
too — (I have never recovered from it!) — still do I 
forgive him for the old love I bore him. Let me 
keep the sacred pledge of my boyish faith, to re- 
member him at his best, as he asked me to, that night 
when we left the old boat together and I marked 
something different in him ; let me think of him as 
I loved to see him in our school days, lying asleep 
with his head on his arm ... So they found 
him after the great storm and wreck, lying at rest 
amid the ruins of the home he had wronged. . . . 

Ours was the marsh country down by the sea, 
where I first saw the Convict, what time the guns 

179 



were firing and the hulks lay at anchor near by 
. . . Wasn't it kind of dear old Joe to put that 
inscription over his bad and worthless father — 

Whatsomever the failings on his part, 

Rememher, reader, he had that good in his heart . . 

I saw that snorting old Pumblechook yesterday 
when I was on my way to Miss Havisham's — he al- 
ways makes me feel guilty, as if he knew something 
bad about me. . . . 

What a strange lady Miss Havisham is, and why 
does she stay, dressed all in white and covered with 
old bridal finery, in a room where candles burn al- 
ways and from which the light of day is shut out? 
. . . Oh, Estelle, Estelle! — how beautiful she 
was to-day ! How I love her and how she wounds 
me with her disdain ! Yet once I plucked up cour- 
age to ask her for a kiss, and she slapped me on the 
cheek — I feel the sting of it yet ! But my turn came 
when I had whipped the prowling boy behind the 
brewery wall and she, unseen by us both, had watch-- 
ed the battle. "You may kiss me if you please," she 
said, with flushed cheek — how lovely she was in her 
conquered pride, and what a reward was mine ! . . . 

Ever the best of friends, ain't us, Pip? Dear 

old Joe ! shall I ever forget when he came to see me 
at my lodgings in London and the trouble he had to 
keep his hat from falling? What a giant he was at 
the forge, though as gentle as a child! Surly Or- 
lick soon found his master. 

Beat it out, heat it out, old Clem, 
With a clink to the stout, old Clem! . . . 

180 



Bentley Drummle came to Mr. Pocket's school 
when he was a head taller than that gentleman and 
several heads thicker than most young gentlemen 
. . . I can not believe that Estelle will marry 
that fool and brute. . . He came up the stair- 
way as I held the light for him and looked at me 
with a peculiar expression. . . "When the colonists 
rode by me on their blooded horses I said to my- 
self, I am making a better gentleman nor any of 
you". . . How strange it was of Mr. Jaggers to 
ask his housekeeper to show us her hands ! . . . 
Good God ! Could it be possible that this convict, 
yet my benefactor, Abel Magwitch, was Estelle's 
father? . . . I went to the forge and it was 
strangely quiet. The house was closed. I walked 
toward the little church and suddenly I met them, 
Joe, smiling and awkward in his Sunday clothes, 
Biddy in her best attire — "It is my wedding day 
and I am married to Joe!" . . . 

A broad stream of light united the judge and the 
condemned, reminding some there present of that 
greater Judgment to which all alike were passing 
and which can not err. Standing for a moment, a 
distinct speck in that sea of light, the prisoner said, 
"My lord, I have received my sentence from the hand 
of the Almighty, but I bow to yours." . . A woman 
was sitting there alone — it was Estelle! "We are 
friends?" I said. "Yes," she answered, "and will 
continue friends apart." I took her hand and we 
went out of the ruined churchyard together. The 
mists were rising as they rose on that morning long 
ago when I first left the forge. And in all the broad 

181 



expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw 
no shadow of another parting from her. . . . 
Why this must be Mr. Pecksniff's Architectooraloo- 
ral Academy! I hear Mercy giggling on the stair. 
There is the portrait by Spiller, the bust by Spoker, 
and as I live, here is Tom Pinch still making a 
shamefaced attempt to learn the violin between the 
bed-clothes. Poor Tom Pinch! Have I ever seen 
simple-hearted kindness and truth in the world 
without thinking of thee? — have I ever seen unctu- 
ous pretence and rascality without recalling thy 
master? And yet they say thy Creator could not 
draw a character according to nature — ^the fools! . . 
Yo-ho — a race with the moon. I am making that 
famous journey with Tom Pinch by stage coach to 
London. But lo! we have not gone far when we 
overhaul Nicholas and Smike on the road, fleeing 
to London, too, after thrashing Squeers and turn- 
ing loose the tender youth of Dotheboys. Shall 
we make room for them? — well! . . But have a 
care, coachman, that Jonas Chuzzlewit shall not get 
a lift with us, for we have a dreadful suspicion of 
Something he left behind him in the wood. . . 
Who were those two that crossed the road before us 
just then and slunk away in the shadow, a big hulk- 
ing fellow and a boy? — I'll wager it was Bill Sykes 
and Oliver Twist going to crack a crib — more of 
Fagin's deviltry! . . Yo-ho! the lights of Lon- 
don! — and here we are at last at London Bridge 
where, quite giddy and breathless, we get down with 
Tom Pinch and the others — did I say that we had 
also picked up Codlin and Short, Mr. Scrooge and 

182 



Tim Linkinwater, and a silent gentleman who 
cracked his joints incessantly? — I catch a glimpse 
of Eogue Riderhood slinking about his evil affairs 
and still wearing that old cap like a drowned dog. 
Drowned! That was the word in flaring black let- 
ters which stared from a dead wall — I saw John 
Harmon, muffled to the ears, stand before it a long 
time. . . . Now in the lighted city, and who of 
all strangely assorted beings of fact or fancy should 
I see in close conversation but Mr. Jarvis Lorry of 
Tellson's and Mr. Tulkinghom of Lincoln's Inn 
Fields! No doubt they are talking about the 
strange disappearance of Lady Dedlock — I wonder 
if that boy limping past them, unheeded, who looks 
so like Poor Jo, could throw any light on it. . . 
But what grotesque figures are these under the cor- 
ner lamp, with bonneted heads bobbing at each other 
in eager colloquy? My life! it's Miss Flite and 
Sairey Gamp (dear Mrs. Gamp! thou too art said 
to be of an unreal world, yet do I hold thee dearer 
than all the joyless realities of their realism). I 
catch a few words — "the Man from Shropshire" — 
and I surmise they are gossiping about the strange 
end of that unfortunate martyr of Chancery, who 
dropped dead on his one thousandth interruption 
of the Court. . . . 

Plash-water weir mill lock of a balmy summer's 
evening and a rough fellow dressed like a bargeman, 
with a red neckerchief, who looks strangely like 
the schoolmaster Bradley Headstone. Was that 
the careless, handsome Eugene Wrayburn who went 
on before? Hurry, for God's sake, ere murder be 

183 



done — ^yoii have not seen that man as I did, smash 
his desperate hand against a stone wall. Hark! 
a blow! — another! — a splash — we are too late. 
But look ! Lizzie Hexam is there before us, rowing 
her boat with firm nerve and practised skill. Now 
thanks to God for that old time, and let me but save 
his life, even though it be for another ! . . 

At Dr. Blimber's select academy for young gen- 
tlemen, and Master Bitherstone has just asked me, 
in a crisis of wounded feeling, if I would please map 
out for him an easy overland route to Bengal. I 
listened distractedly for my mind was fixed on the 
New Boy. And who is this little fellow sitting sad- 
ly alone while the grave clock seems to repeat the 
Doctor's greeting: "How, is, my, lit, tie, friend, 
how, is, my, lit, tie, friend?" Oh thou rejected of 
men and critics, let the world deny thee as it may, 
I call Heaven to witness that I was once as thou; 
that I wept true tears over thy young sorrows ; that 
no child of my own house is more real to me than 
Paul Dombey! . . . 

Mr. Richard Swiveller has just confided to me the 
extraordinary dilemma in which he finds himself — 
we were having a modest quencher, which induced 
the confidence. Mr. Swiveller's creditors have in- 
creased at such a rate that the principal thorough- 
fares are now closed to him, and in order to get only 
across the way, he is obliged to go into the country. 
I should have heard more on this interesting sub- 
ject but for the sudden appearance, at the door, of 
a small person — Mr. Swiveller humorously called 
her the Marchioness — who made frantic gestures, 

184 



importing that his presence was required in the 
establishment of Sampson Brass, Barrister-at-law. 
. . Little Nell was dead. No sleep so calm and 
beautiful, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look 
upon. She seemed a creature fresh from the hand 
of God — not one that had lived and suffered Death. 
. . (And this, too, they have rejected, because, 
they say, it is blank verse ! ) . 

Have you ever heard the legend of Bleeding Heart 
Yard where Mr. Banks collects the rent and the 
Patriarch benevolently airs his bumps? — 

Bleeding heart, bleeding heart, 
Bleeding away! 

Mrs. Plornish (who translates the Italian so ele- 
gantly) told it me not long ago, but though it was 
very sad, I have forgotten it. Perhaps because I 
was watching the eager eyes of John Baptist Caval- 
letto and wondering what he knows about one Ri- 
gaud whose moustache goes up and whose nose 
comes down. . . I am sure now that if Arthur 
Clennam had not given his heart to the young lady 
and there had been no such thing as her engage- 
ment to Another, the rain would still have behaved 
just as it did — that is, it would have fallen heavily, 
drearily. But oh! I did not think so then. . . 

"Amy, is Bob on the lock?" . . . 

I see an old man with white hair standing at the 
head of a rich banquet table and looking strangely 
upon the two long lines of astonished guests. Then 
I see Her go swiftly to his side and lay her hand on 
his arm, without shame, proud of him, loving him. 

185 



And in her eyes I see the fulness of that love 
through which the human reaches the divine — that 
love which, among English writers, Charles Dick- 
ens has best figured and expressed. . . "Ladies 
and gentlemen, I am called the Father of the Mar- 
shalsea. It is, ahem, a title, hum, hum, I may say 
earned, ahem, earned, by a somewhat protracted 
period of, ahem, residence. On this account it is, 
ahem, customary for visitors and, hum, hum, stu- 
dents, to make me a little offering, which usually 
takes the form of, ahem, a slight pecuniary dona- 
tion. This is my daughter, ladies and gentlemen. 
Born here, bred here I" 

So they pass in review before my fond memory — 
the people of Dickens: a wonderful procession, 
fantastic, varied, extraordinary, not surely of this 
world, perhaps, but then of a better one — the magic 
realm of the master wizard of English story. And 
yet I am glad that I read him as a boy — that he be- 
longs with so much else that is precious to the en- 
chanted period of life. Rich as that genius was, 
and on many counts without a rival, one must I fear 
break with the charm when the illusions of youth 
are past. This is less the fault and loss of Dickens 
than our own. 

Therefore, loving Dickens as I do, I am yet not 
ashamed to confess that since boyhood I have re- 
read but few of his books — one of these was the 
"Tale of Two Cities," and either the drinker was 
changed or there was something alien in the 
draught. I do not own a set of them, not even the 

186 



old Franklin Square novels, which, a rasrared regi- 
ment, have long since fluttered away into that dear 
and irrecoverable country where lie the lost treas- 
ures of youth. So I can honestly say that in the 
foregoing pages I have jotted down, without art or 
method, some memories still fresh after twenty 
years— it is perhaps given to few authors to inspire 
us with such lasting recollections. Yet if I were 
to lose all these, I should not be beggared: there 
would still remain a world of Dickens in my remem- 
brance. 



F/Vi/V. 




187 



